Spatio-Temporal Gaussian Process for Building Terrain-Incorporating Wind Power Curves

Accurate modeling of wind turbine power curves is crucial for optimal wind farm operation. Nearly all existing power curve models focus on temporal variables such as wind speed and temperature while overlooking the influence of terrain covariates, which governs inflow wind conditions and thus also affects wind power production. This paper proposes a nonparametric spatio-temporal Gaussian process model that integrates temporal environmental covariates with spatial terrain features. The model falls in the category of spatial-temporal Gaussian process models with data on a grid. The challenge to be addressed is that the spatio-temporal modeling require certain temporal alignment among the data, a property that the wind farm data does not have. Our solution strategy is to construct a shared representative temporal covariate set which not only aligns the temporal inputs but also has a size an order of magnitude smaller than the original data size. With this transformation, our resulting model is able to employ a separable kernel structure that captures both spatial and temporal dependencies. Empirical analysis on a real wind farm dataset shows that our method improves predictive accuracy over existing baselines and can be used to quantify the various impact of the terrain characteristics on turbine performance.