Fast-Powerformer: A Memory-Efficient Transformer for Accurate Mid-Term Wind Power Forecasting

Abstract

Wind power forecasting (WPF), as a significant research topic within renewable energy, plays a crucial role in enhancing the security, stability, and economic operation of power grids. However, due to the high stochasticity of meteorological factors (e.g., wind speed) and significant fluctuations in wind power output, mid-term wind power forecasting faces a dual challenge of maintaining high accuracy and computational efficiency. To address these issues, this paper proposes an efficient and lightweight mid-term wind power forecasting model, termed Fast-Powerformer. The proposed model is built upon the Reformer architecture, incorporating structural enhancements such as a lightweight Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) embedding module, an input transposition mechanism, and a Frequency Enhanced Channel Attention Mechanism (FECAM). These improvements enable the model to strengthen temporal feature extraction, optimize dependency modeling across variables, significantly reduce computational complexity, and enhance sensitivity to periodic patterns and dominant frequency components. Experimental results conducted on multiple real-world wind farm datasets demonstrate that the proposed Fast-Powerformer achieves superior prediction accuracy and operational efficiency compared to mainstream forecasting approaches. Furthermore, the model exhibits fast inference speed and low memory consumption, highlighting its considerable practical value for real-world deployment scenarios.