Enhancing spatiotemporal wind power forecasting with meta-learning in data-scarce environments

Accurate wind power forecasting is critical for maintaining stable power grids, yet the inherent variability of wind and limited data availability for new wind farms present significant challenges. To address these issues, we present a novel artificial intelligence framework that integrates a self-attention enhanced Spatiotemporal Long Short-Term Memory (ST-LSTM) network with Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML), termed as the Meta-Learning Spatiotemporal Attention Long Short-Term Memory framework (MAML-STALSTM). This deep learning combination enables the model to effectively capture long-range spatiotemporal dependencies while rapidly adapting to new wind farm configurations or changing wind conditions with minimal training data. By employing rigorous data preprocessing techniques and ensuring temporal separation in data splitting, we mitigate potential data leakage and enhance the model's generalizability. Extensive experiments conducted on both onshore and offshore wind farm datasets demonstrate that our artificial intelligence approach outperforms established baseline models, particularly excelling in data-scarce environments. Ablation studies highlight the crucial roles of the self-attention mechanism and meta-learning in improving forecasting accuracy, adaptation speed, and model robustness. These results emphasize the practical benefits of our approach in enhancing grid stability and supporting the seamless integration of wind energy, thereby contributing significantly to the advancement of sustainable energy solutions.