Abstract:With the large - scale access of wind power grid,the wind power has more and more influence on power grid. Because the wind power output is random,intermittent and uncontrolled,it brings the huge challenge to power grid dispatching and operation. In order to make full use of wind power,the wind power must be changed from unknown to known,and the prediction accuracy of wind power output should be improved. A neural network method based on imperialist competitive algorithm ( ICA - NN) is presented to improve the accuracy of short - term wind power prediction. In this method,first of all,a prediction model of wind speed is established based on artificial neural network with multi - layer perceptron ( MLP) ,and then,the weight values of neural network are optimized with the imperialist competitive algorithm. The prediction method has been applied to a wind farm in Xinjiang,which verifies its effectiveness in short - term wind power prediction,and proves that the proposed method can improve the accuracy of short - term wind power prediction.