Wind power generation output is highly uncertain, since it entirely depends on intermittent environmental factors. This has brought a serious problem to the power industry regarding the management of power grids containing a significant penetration of wind power. Therefore, a highly accurate wind power forecast is very useful for operating these power grids effectively and sustainably. In this study, a new dual-step integrated machine learning (ML) model based on the hybridization of wavelet transform (WT), ant colony optimization algorithm (ACO), and feedforward artificial neural network (FFANN) is devised for a 24 h-ahead wind energy generation forecast. The devised model consists of dual steps. The first step uses environmental factors (weather variables) to estimate wind speed at the installation point of the wind generation system. The second step fits the wind farm actual generation with the actual wind speed observation at the location of the farm. The predicted future speed in the first step is later given to the second step to estimate the future generation of the farm. The devised method achieves significantly acceptable and promising forecast accuracy. The forecast accuracy of the devised method is evaluated through several criteria and compared with other ML based models and persistence based reference models. The daily mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), the normalized mean absolute error (NMAE), and the forecast skill (FS) values achieved by the devised method are 4.67%, 0.82%, and 56.22%, respectively. The devised model outperforms all the evaluated models with respect to various performance criteria.