Wind energy is one of the emerging sustainable sources of electricity. Wind is intermittent in nature. The typical grid operation of wind energy is complex. The significance of wind energy generation and integration with the grid is increasing day by day. An accurate wind speed forecasting method will help the utility planners and operators to meet the balance of supply and demand by generating wind energy. In this paper, a statistical-based wind speed prediction is implemented without utilizing the numerical weather prediction inputs. This analytical study proposes a hybrid short-term prediction approach that can successfully preprocess the original wind speed data to enhance the forecasting accuracy. The most efficient signal decomposition algorithm, Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition is used for preprocessing. This ensemble empirical mode decomposition technique decomposes the original wind speed data. Each decomposed signal is regressed to forecast the future wind speed value by utilizing the Adaptive Wavelet Neural Network model. The proposed hybrid approach is subsequently investigated with respect to the wind farm of South India. The results from a real-world case study in India are reported along with comprehensive comparison. The prediction performance delivered high accuracy, less uncertainty and low computational burden in the forecasts attained. The developed hybrid model outperforms the six other benchmark models such as persistence method, back propagation neural network, radial basis function neural network, Elman neural network, Gaussian regression neural network, and wavelet neural network.