Abstract
The conventional sources of energy such as oil, natural gas, coal, or nuclear are finite and generate environmental pollution. Alternatively, renewable energy source like wind is clean and abundantly available in nature. Wind power has a huge potential of becoming a major source of renewable energy for this modern world. It is a clean, emission-free power generation technology. Wind energy has been experiencing very rapid growth in Brazil and in Uruguay; therefore, it’s a promising industry in these countries. Thus, this rapid expansion can bring several regional benefits and contribute to sustainable development, especially in places with low economic development. Therefore, the scope of this chapter is to estimate short-term wind speed forecasting applying computational intelligence, by recurrent neural networks (RNN), using anemometers data collected by an anemometric tower at a height of 100.0 m in Brazil (tropical region) and 101.8 m in Uruguay (subtropical region), both Latin American countries. The results of this study are compared with wind speed prediction results from the literature. In one of the cases investigated, this study proved to be more appropriate when analyzing evaluation metrics (error and regression) of the prediction results obtained by the proposed model.