Mathematical Problems in Engineering
Volume 2010 (2010), Article ID 684742, 17 pages
doi:10.1155/2010/684742
Research Article

The Forecasting Procedure for Long-Term Wind Speed in the Zhangye Area

1State Key Laboratory of Numerical Modeling for Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China
2School of Mathematics & Statistics, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou 730000, China
3Department of Software Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology, Sydney, P.O. Box 123, City Campus, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia

Received 21 August 2010; Accepted 12 November 2010

Academic Editor: Wei-Chiang Hong

Copyright © 2010 Zhenhai Guo et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Energy crisis has made it urgent to find alternative energy sources for sustainable energy supply; wind energy is one of the attractive alternatives. Within a wind energy system, the wind speed is one key parameter; accurately forecasting of wind speed can minimize the scheduling errors and in turn increase the reliability of the electric power grid and reduce the power market ancillary service costs. This paper proposes a new hybrid model for long-term wind speed forecasting based on the first definite season index method and the Autoregressive Moving Average (ARMA) models or the Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) forecasting models. The forecasting errors are analyzed and compared with the ones obtained from the ARMA, GARCH model, and Support Vector Machine (SVM); the simulation process and results show that the developed method is simple and quite efficient for daily average wind speed forecasting of Hexi Corridor in China.