Deep learning has become an important tool for wind power forecasting because it can help improve wind energy utilization and support reliable grid-connected operation. For wind farms, accurate turbine-level forecasting depends on spatial interactions among turbines and temporal evolution of historical operating data. In this study, a spatio-temporal forecasting framework is developed by combining a Graph Attention Network with a Temporal Convolutional Network. The graph attention module describes the neighborhood relations among turbines and learns their influence strengths adaptively, while the temporal convolution module extracts temporal patterns from multivariate SCADA sequences for multi-step prediction. On this basis, the learned attention weights are further used to define a node influence metric. This makes it possible to identify a small set of key turbines and use only their historical data to predict the future power output of the whole wind farm. The proposed framework is evaluated using one year of SCADA data from 134 turbines. A sliding-window dataset is constructed, and the model is tested on the training, validation, and test sets. The results show that the method can capture the spatio-temporal dependencies within the wind farm and still provide effective farm-wide forecasting when only limited observation nodes are available. The value of this work lies in organizing existing techniques around a practical wind farm forecasting task and in providing an interpretable prediction strategy based on key turbine selection, rather than in proposing a fundamentally new theoretical model.
Liu et al. (Tue,) studied this question.