Probabilistic Spatiotemporal Modeling of Day-Ahead Wind Power Generation with Input-Warped Gaussian Processes

Wind power is one of the fastest-growing renewable energy sectors and a key pillar for the transition to a carbon-free economy. In 2023, energy from wind accounted for 10.2% of all U.S. utility-scale electricity generation [54]. Being intrinsically weather-driven, wind power injects uncertainty into the balancing of power demand and generation. On the daily operational time scale, quantifying the asset-specific and area-wide uncertainty of renewable generation for the next day is an essential ingredient of grid management. Specifically, grid operators need probabilistic spatiotemporal forecasting of wind power in order to appropriately set grid reserves, ensure grid stability, and optimize dispatch of grid resources. Our goal is to develop a statistical framework for short-term wind power generation simulations across space and time. This project is motivated by working with a large dataset of wind generation in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) region and is geared to the concrete practical concerns faced by electricity grid operators. We refer to our team's related publications [8, 7, 52, 38] that employ similar simulations for various downstream risk management tasks; other use cases are discussed, among others, in [27, 33, 35, 58].