Wind speed high-precision prediction is one of the most important technical aspects to protect the safety of wind power utilization. In this study, two new hybrid methods [FEEMD-MEA-MLP/FEEMD-GA-MLP] are proposed for the wind speed accurate multi-step predictions by combining FEEMD (Fast Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition), MEA (Mind Evolutionary Algorithm), GA (Genetic Algorithm) and MLP (Multi Layer Perceptron) neural networks. In these two hybrid methods, the FEEMD algorithm is adopted to decompose the original wind speed series into a number of sub-layers and the MLP neural networks optimized by the MEA algorithm and the GA algorithm are built to predict the decomposed wind speed sub-layers, respectively. The innovation of the study is to investigate the promoted percentages of the MLP neural networks by the FEEMD decomposition and the MEA/GA optimization, respectively. The involved forecasting models in the performance comparison in the study include the hybrid FEEMD-MEA-MLP, the hybrid FEEMD -GA-MLP, the hybrid FEEMD-MLP, the hybrid MEA-MLP, the hybrid GA-MLP and the single MLP. Two experimental results show that: (a) among all the involved methods, the hybrid FEEMD-MEA-MLP model has the best forecasting performance; (b) the FEEMD algorithm promotes the performance of the MLP neural networks significantly while the MEA/GA algorithms do not improve the performance of the MLP neural networks significantly; and (c) the hybrid FEEMD-MEA-MLP method and the hybrid FEEMD-GA-MLP method are both effective in the wind speed high-precision predictions. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.