Solar energy currently plays a significant role in supplying clean and renewable electric energy worldwide. Harnessing solar energy through PV plants requires problems such as site selection to be solved, for which long-term solar resource assessment and photovoltaic energy forecasting are fundamental issues. This paper proposes a fast-track methodology to address these two critical requirements when exploring a vast area to locate, in a first approximation, potential sites to build PV plants. This methodology retrieves solar radiation and temperature data from free access databases for the arbitrary division of the region of interest into land cells. Data clustering and probability techniques were then used to obtain the mean daily solar radiation per month per cell, and cells are clustered by radiation level into regions with similar solar resources, mapped monthly. Simultaneously, temperature probabilities are determined per cell and mapped. Then, PV energy is calculated, including heat losses. Finally, PV energy forecasting is accomplished by constructing the P50 and P95 estimations of the mean yearly PV energy. A case study in Mexico fully demonstrates the methodology using hourly data from 2000 to 2020 from NSRDB. The proposed methodology is validated by comparison with actual PV plant generation throughout the country.

Given the imminent threats of climate change, it is urgent to boost the use of clean energy, being wind energy a potential candidate. Nowadays, deployment of wind turbines has become extremely important and long-term estimation of the produced power entails a challenge to achieve good prediction accuracy for site assessment, economic feasibility analysis, farm dispatch, and system operation. We present a method for long-term wind power forecasting using wind turbine properties, statistics, and genetic programming. First, due to the high degree of intermittency of wind speed, we characterize it with Weibull probability distributions and consider wind speed data of time intervals corresponding to prediction horizons of 30, 25, 20, 15 and 10 days ahead. Second, we perform the prediction of a wind speed distribution with genetic programming using the parameters of the Weibull distribution and other relevant meteorological variables. Third, the estimation of wind power is obtained by integrating the forecasted wind velocity distribution into the wind turbine power curve. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method, we present a case study for a location in Mexico with low wind speeds. Estimation results are promising when compared against real data, as shown by MAE and MAPE forecasting metrics.

Wind power is an important energy source that can be used to supply clean energy and meet current energy needs. Despite its advantages in terms of zero emissions, its main drawback is its intermittency. Deterministic approaches to forecast wind power generation based on the annual average wind speed are usually used; however, statistical treatments are more appropriate. In this paper, an intelligent statistical methodology to forecast annual wind power is proposed. The seasonality of wind is determined via a clustering analysis of monthly wind speed probabilistic distribution functions (PDFs) throughout $n$ years. Subsequently, a methodology to build the wind resource typical year (WRTY) for the $n+1$ year is introduced to characterize the resource into the so-called statistical seasons (SSs). Then, the wind energy produced at each SS is calculated using its PDFs. Finally, the forecasted annual energy for the $n+1$ year is given as the sum of the produced energies in the SSs. A wind farm in Mexico is chosen as a case study. The SSs, WRTY, and seasonal and annual generated energies are estimated and validated. Additionally, the forecasted annual wind energy for the $n+1$ year is calculated deterministically from the $n$ year. The results are compared with the measured data, and the former are more accurate.

Nowadays, wind turbines are one of the most popular devices for producing clean and renewable electric energy. The rotor blades catch the wind’s kinetic energy to produce rotational energy from the turbine and electric energy from the generator. In small-scale wind turbines, there are several methods to operate the blades to obtain the desired speed of rotation and power outputs. These methods include passive stall, active stall, and pitch control. Pitch control sets the angular position of the blades to face the wind to achieve a predefined relationship between turbine speed or power and wind velocity. Typically, conventional Proportional Integral (PI) controllers are used to set the angular position of the rotor blades or pitch angle. Nevertheless, the quality of speed or power regulation may vary substantially. This study introduces a rotor speed controller for a pitch-controlled small-scale wind turbine prototype based on fuzzy logic concepts. The basics of fuzzy systems required to implement this kind of controller are presented in detail to counteract the lack of such material in the technical literature. The knowledge base of the fuzzy speed controller is composed of Takagi–Sugeno–Kang (TSK) fuzzy inference rules that implement a dedicated PI controller for any desired interval of wind velocities. Each wind velocity interval is defined with a fuzzy set. Simulation experiments show that the TSK fuzzy PI speed controller can outperform the conventional PI controller in the speed and accuracy of response, stability, and robustness over the whole range of operation of the wind turbine prototype.

Electric power load forecasting is essential for the efficient operation and strategic planning of utilities. Decisions regarding the electric market, power generation, load management, and infrastructure development all rely on accurate load predictions. This work presents a novel methodology for day-ahead load forecasting. The approach employs a long short-term memory neural network (LSTM NN) trained on representative load and meteorological data from the region. Before training, the load dataset is grouped by its statistical seasonality through K-means clustering analysis. Clustering load demand, along with similar-day data management, enables more focused training of the LSTM network on uniform data subsets, enhancing the model’s ability to capture temporal patterns and reducing the complexity associated with high variability in demand data. A case study using hourly load demand time-series data provided by the Centro Nacional de Control de Energía (CENACE) is analyzed, and the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) is calculated, showing lower MAPE than traditional methods. This hybrid approach demonstrates the potential of integrating clustering techniques with neural networks and representative meteorological data from the region to achieve more reliable and accurate regional day-ahead load forecasting.