An overview of performance evaluation metrics for short-term statistical wind power forecasting

Wind power forecasting has become an essential tool for energy trading and the operation of the grid due to the increasing importance of wind energy. Therefore, estimating the forecast accuracy of a WPF model and understanding how the accuracy is calculated are necessary steps to appropriately validate WPF models. The present study gives an extensive overview of the performance evaluation methods used for assessing the forecast accuracy of short-term statistical wind power forecast estimates, and the concept of robustness is introduced to determine the validity of a model over different wind power generation scenarios over the testing set. Finally, a numerical study using decomposition-based hybrid models is presented to analyse the robustness of the performance evaluation metrics under different conditions in the context of wind power forecasting. Data from Ireland are employed using two different resolutions to examine its influence on the forecast accuracy.