PowerSight Premium Wind Forecasting

Designed for: Energy Marketer/Trader, Grid System Operator & Operator

For pricing and purchase details:

Product Description

Primary Uses

Energy trading and marketing
Power grid integration
Reducing imbalance charges
Making informed decisions about reserve energy sources
Construction phase decision-making
Daily operational and maintenance planning
Reducing the occurrence and length of curtailments
Overall system optimization

After years of effort to find a wind site with real potential and millions invested in funding, how do you capitalize on your investment and meet the revenue and capacity goals set up by your preliminary expectations? Knowing what kind of conditions will come in the next hour to week ahead is crucial to making cost effective decisions during the construction of your wind project and efficiently managing your project once it is fully functional.

PowerSight Premium Wind Forecasting is geared toward more market-based wind projects, providing site-specific, accurate forecasting every ten minutes to effectively manage wind project operations, provide for reliable power grid integration, and make market-based energy trading decisions. It offers a complete toolset for operating a wind asset to maximize power production, reduce imbalance charges, and trade both real-time and day-ahead energy effectively.

Forecasts are delivered through a customizable, client-specific dashboard interface and include easily interpreted graphics for hour, day, and week-ahead predictions of wind generation. Other environmental conditions, such as air temperature and precipitation, are also incorporated into the forecast package with graphical meteograms, which clearly illustrate the forecast time evolution of all of the key meteorological variables that influence project operations. In addition, we provide downloadable power and weather forecast data files to facilitate easy integration into your own internal software and scheduling systems.

As well as ease of use, this forecast package also offers unparalleled accuracy by incorporating numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, advanced statistical prediction methods, and integrating real-time observations. When historical met tower or power production data is available, 3TIER will apply model output statistics (or MOS) to our atmospheric model simulations. This process significantly reduces overall forecast error and corrects forecast biases while preserving wind power ramp predictions. To further improve accuracy, 3TIER integrates real-time wind project data directly into the short-term forecast model, so you get the most precise, real-time forecast available. To ensure that your forecast is always performing at optimal levels, 3TIER has included a System Status Tool, which allows you to get a synopsis of the current health of your project's real-time data feed with a dashboard-style report.

In addition, 3TIER can provide an Outage Scheduler, which makes scheduling future outages or curtailments more manageable via a simple web-based tool in the forecasting interface. By utilizing this tool, 3TIER can take periods where turbines are off line into account in overall forecast predictions, greatly improving the forecast accuracy. 3TIER is so confident in our forecasting accuracy that we provide verification graphics showing how well 3TIER forecasts have performed against actual power generation.

Technical Overview

Product Features

Wind Power Forecast Tools:

Hour-ahead forecast for power
Day-ahead forecast for power
Week-ahead forecast for power
Downloadable forecast data files
System status tool
Recent Performance Tools:
- 24 hours
- 30 days
- Power curve
Verification Tools:
- Hour-ahead forecast
- Day-ahead forecast

Weather Forecast Tools:

Meteograms for air temperature, precipitation, and hub height wind speed
Downloadable forecast data files

Optional Features

The interface can include an Outage Scheduler (i.e. available project capacity can be reduced), which allows 3TIER to incorporate planned outages or curtailments into our forecast.
Where at least one year of historical met tower or power production data is available, MOS-correction can be applied to improve forecast accuracy and reduce bias.
Seasonal Wind Power Forecast can be added to your wind forecast, which projects 12 months into the future and is based on 40 years of site-specific climatology and climate index forecasts.

Product Highlights

A powerful yet easy to use dashboard interface for accessing your wind power forecasts at a glance.
Guaranteed 24/7 availability
Guaranteed accuracy for the skill of the forecast
Forecasts for your location update as often as every ten minutes, provide predictions for the next operating hour, and extend 168 hours into the future (1 full week).
Security. Easily set your own permissions system for access to forecast information with usernames and passwords for every forecast tool. In addition, 3TIER provides a secure password protected web host server for all data transfers.

Delivery Method

Forecasting data tools are made available via a client-specific dashboard interface accompanied by a data file with multiple format options (CSV, XML, XLS).

Methodology

Aligned with 3TIER's belief in using proven, state-of-the-art modeling technologies to solve forecasting problems, our high-resolution forecast system is a combination of advanced statistical algorithms, highly customized mesoscale numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, self-learning artificial intelligence models, and publicly available weather forecasts, including data from the US National Weather Service as well as other global weather forecast centers. Our model incorporates the climatology and terrain for your project location using diurnal variability averages on a monthly time-scale and integrates real-time data from your project and met tower as well as thousands of surface weather stations.

Customer Requirements

In order to provide wind power forecasts, 3TIER must be supplied with meta data for your project such as: time zone, project location, hub height, turbine model, naming conventions, and other identifiers for met towers and turbines.

For data integration, the skill of the hour-ahead forecasts greatly depends on the timely receipt of high-quality, real-time observations from the wind project. While hour-ahead forecasts can be provided without observations, the quality of this forecast is greatly improved with real-time data including: project power output, turbine availability, and near hub height wind conditions from met towers. To facilitate the transfer of real-time data, 3TIER will work with you to set up an automated and robust way of transferring this information.

If you are unfamiliar with the technical terminology on this page, please visit our Glossary for more information.