Improving Wind and Solar Power Prediction with Efficient Wrapper-based Feature Selection: An Empirical Study
Authors: Daniel Grillmeyer, Marius Hadry, Michael Stenger, Vanessa Borst, Veronika Lesch, Samuel Kounev
Organizations: University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany · Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University Mosbach, Mosbach, Germany
Abstract
With rising global energy demand and growing awareness of climate change and its impacts, the share of renewable energies in the global energy mix continues to grow. Unlike conventional power generation, the output of renewable energy sources cannot be controlled as consistently due to their dependence on environmental conditions. Therefore, reliable prediction of current and future energy production is essential. In this paper, we report findings from two structured literature reviews on real-world renewable energy prediction tasks: wind turbine power curve modeling and photovoltaic power prediction. For the former, we conducted a comprehensive literature review ourselves, while for the latter, we synthesize the key findings regarding frequently selected input features based on an existing survey. Across both domains, our analysis reveals that despite the large number of available monitoring and environmental variables, only limited or unsystematic methods for feature selection exist. To address this gap, we propose Cluster-based Sequential Feature Selection (CSFS), a novel, model-agnostic, clustering-based wrapper method for automatic, efficient, and reliable feature selection in renewable energy prediction pipelines. To support reproducibility and reuse, we provide an open-source implementation of CSFS on GitHub. We empirically evaluate the proposed approach on both use cases and compare it with established feature selection techniques such as wrapper-based sequential feature selection (SFS), filter-based methods, and Random Forest's embedded feature importance. The results show that the wrapper-based methods overall provide better-performing selections of features. CSFS achieves a predictive performance comparable to SFS while reducing computational cost by an average of 21%.
Accurate production forecasts are essential for the integration of renewable energy sources into the power grid. This paper illustrates how to obtain probabilistic forecasts of wind power generation using gradient boosting trees and an ensemble of weather forecasts. To this end, we perform a comparative analysis across three state-of-the-art probabilistic prediction methods-conformalized quantile regression, natural gradient boosting and conditional diffusion models-all of which can be combined with tree-based machine learning. The methods are validated using four years of data for all Belgian offshore wind farms. We benchmark the models against the power curve and a calibrated wake model as well as a probabilistic method using stochastic variational Gaussian process regression. The tree-based models significantly reduce the mean absolute error in comparison to the deterministic baselines. Additionally, all three methods outperform the Gaussian process baseline in probabilistic skill, while two out of the three also improve point forecast accuracy. The conditional diffusion model attains the best performance, with improvements of 5% in mean absolute error and 12% in continuous rank probability score compared to the probabilistic baseline. Last, the results indicate an average improvement in point forecast accuracy of 17% by using an ensemble of weather forecasts instead of a single provider.
Max Bruninx, Diederik van Binsbergen, Timothy Verstraeten +2
Global wind power capacity, especially in China, is booming, with new farms spanning diverse terrains and climates. The industry urgently needs accurate wind power foundation models to shorten commissioning and accelerate grid connection. This is because site-specific time series models (TSMs) are not well suited to data-scarce scenarios and generalize poorly, while generic large time series models (LTSMs) are mostly limited to univariate inputs and cannot fully exploit static site attributes or the dependencies between power and meteorological covariates, leading to insufficient accuracy. To fill this gap, we propose \textbf{Tyan-WP}, the first wind power foundation model for ultra-short-term probabilistic forecasting. Pretrained on a large-scale wind power dataset covering more than 126,000 U.S. sites over seven years, Tyan-WP further improves zero-shot forecasting through two domain-specific module designs: static site embedding using coordinate, terrain, and ecoregion metadata, and a power-aware meteorological fusion (PAMF) module that models interactions between historical power and meteorological covariates. Under a unified evaluation protocol, Tyan-WP surpasses eight site-specific supervised TSMs on 10 in-domain sites and outperforms eleven generic LTSMs on 127 in-domain sites, reducing MAE by 19.9%, RMSE by 16.6%, CRPS by 22.2%, and AQL by 21.7%, while raising R^2 by 16.7%. It further demonstrates strong cross-geography generalization on six real U.K. sites. These results show that the wind power foundation model can achieve accurate zero-shot forecasting without target-site training, providing a practical pathway for rapid turbine onboarding and probabilistic risk management at new wind farms.
Day-ahead wind power forecasting is essential for cost-effective power-system operation. It is primarily driven by future meteorological conditions while retaining temporal dependencies in power generation. In practice, observed wind-farm power often entangles physically available power with local environmental effects and latent operational states, such as shutdowns and curtailment. Existing physical models provide useful constraints but adapt poorly across wind farms, whereas data-driven models can capture rich correlations but often conflate meteorological effects with state-induced deviations. In this study, we propose UniWind, a wind power forecasting model based on physics-informed state routing. UniWind first employs a Physical Prior Estimator to construct a site-calibrated physical prior by combining site-conditioned monotonic warping with a shared physical power curve. It further applies a physical upper-bound constraint to shape this prior as a soft envelope of available wind power generation. UniWind then proposes a Latent State Encoder to model operating-state embeddings and transforms the physical prior into final power forecasts through a State-aware Power Corrector, which uses knowledge-guided supervised state routing and bounded, state-specific expert correction. Full-shot and cross-farm zero-shot experiments on more than 20 real-world datasets demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of UniWind.