AI in Wind and Solar Power Forecasting Quiz

Answers and explanations appear as you take the quiz.

1. Why is forecasting wind and solar output harder than forecasting a coal plant's output?
   • Their output depends on variable weather like wind speed and cloud cover
   • Renewable plants are always located offshore
   • They produce direct current that cannot be measured
   • They have no historical data available
2. Which probabilistic methods did the cited offshore-wind study compare?
   • Only a CNN on sky-camera images
   • Conformalized quantile regression, natural gradient boosting, and conditional diffusion models
   • A fixed timetable and linear trend
   • A speech recognizer and image captioner
3. What is a probabilistic forecast?
   • A forecast that is always exactly correct
   • A forecast made without any weather data
   • A forecast giving a range or distribution of likely outputs, not just one number
   • A forecast only for the next year
4. In the cited Belgian offshore-wind study, what did using an ensemble of weather forecasts change?
   • Accuracy fell by 17% in every region
   • The model no longer needed weather data
   • It proved all renewable forecasts are exact
   • Average point-forecast accuracy improved by 17% in the reported evaluation
5. What does numerical weather prediction (NWP) contribute to longer-horizon renewable forecasts?
   • It physically simulates the atmosphere to predict wind and irradiance days ahead
   • It counts the number of turbines
   • It measures electricity prices
   • It replaces the need for any AI
6. How much historical data did the cited wind-power forecasting study use for validation?
   • Four hours from one solar panel
   • Four years from Belgian offshore wind farms
   • Forty years from every national grid
   • One year of coal-plant output
7. Why are probabilistic renewable-energy forecasts useful to grid operators?
   • They guarantee the exact power output
   • They remove weather uncertainty
   • They communicate a range of possible generation outcomes for planning reserves and balancing
   • They replace grid measurements
8. What happens when actual cloud cover differs from the weather forecast used by a solar model?
   • The solar panels stop generating electricity
   • The model becomes a deterministic forecast
   • The error is always canceled by wind
   • The generation forecast can be wrong, so updates and uncertainty monitoring matter