Data-driven models for short-term ocean wave power forecasting

In order to integrate wave farms into the grid, the power from wave energy converters (WEC) must be forecasted. This study presents a novel data-driven modelling (DDM) method to predict very short-term (15 min-4 h) and short-term (0-72 h) power generation from a WEC. The model is tested using data from an oscillating body converter. Several other methods are tested as well. These include support vector machines (SVM), neural networks (NN), and recurrent neural networks (RNN). Of these, the best is the long-short-term memory (LSTM) network, which is trained and updated on observed values. The experiments demonstrate both the SVM and NN forecast well. However, the proposed deep learning models predict them more accurately. The models work well over short horizons. At horizons longer than three days, accuracy deteriorates, and the models cannot fit the data well.