Completion of wind turbine data sets for wind integration studies applying random forests and k-nearest neighbors

The importance of wind power as a renewable and cost-efficient power generation technology is growing globally. The impact of wind power on the existing power system, land use, and others over time has been widely studied. Such wind integration studies, especially when they are designed as retrospective bottom-up studies, rely on detailed wind turbine data, including the geographic locations, hub height, and dates of commission. Given the frequency of gaps present in these data sets, basic concepts have been developed to cope with missing data points. In this paper, multiple advanced algorithms were compared with respect to their ability to complete such data sets. One focus was on the selection of predictor variables to analyze the impact of different completion techniques depending on the specific gaps in the data set. A sample application using a German data set indicated that random forests are particularly well suited to the problem at hand.