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• Echo state network is used for point forecasting of wind power. • Wavelet transform is used to decompose the original signal into several sub-signals. • Ensemble technique is applied to reduce the uncertainty in wind power data. • The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated on two real wind farms. Accurate and reliable wind power forecasting is of great significance for the economic and safe operation of electric power and energy systems. However, due to the negative factors such as inaccurate numerical weather prediction and frequent ramping events, previous wind power prediction methods are difficult to meet actual needs for practical applications. To this end, this paper originally proposes a new wind power prediction method with high accuracy based on echo state network. This method is a hybrid of wavelet transform, echo state network and ensemble technique. Wavelet transform is used to decompose raw wind power time series data into different frequencies with better outliers and behaviors. Then, we adopt the echo state network to automatically learn the nonlinear mapping relationship between input and output in each frequency. Later, ensemble technique is applied to deal with the model misspecification and data noise problems, which are common in wind power prediction, thereby reducing the uncertainty of wind power forecasting and improving prediction accuracy. Finally, we use wind power data from real wind farms in Belgium and China to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. The simulation results show that the proposed method is superior to other benchmark algorithms in prediction accuracy, which indicates that the method has high potentials for practical application in real electric power and energy systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]