Evaluation of wind energy investment with artificial neural networks

Abstract

Countries aiming for sustainability in economic growth and development ensure the reliability of energy supplies. For countries to provide their energy needs uninterruptedly, it is important for domestic and renewable energy sources to be utilised. For this reason, the supply of reliable and sustainable energy has become an important issue that concerns and occupies mankind. Of the renewable energy sources, wind energy is a clean, reliable and inexhaustible source of energy with low operating costs. Turkey is a rich nation in terms of wind energy potential. Forecasting of investment efficiency is an important issue before and during the investment period in wind energy investment process because of high investment costs. It is aimed to forecast the wind energy products monthly with multilayer neural network approach in this study. For this aim a feed forward back propagation neural network model has been established. As a set of data, wind speed values 48 months (January 2012-December 2015) have been used. The training data set occurs from 36 monthly wind speed values (January 2012-December 2014) and the test data set occurs from other values (January-December 2015). Analysis findings show that the trained Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have the ability of accurate prediction for the samples that are not used at training phase. The prediction errors for the wind energy plantation values are ranged between 0.00494-0.015035. Also the overall mean prediction error for this prediction is calculated as 0.004818 (0.48%). In general, we can say that ANNs be able to estimate the aspect of wind energy plant productions.