Wind speed forecasting plays a crucial role in reducing the risk of wind power uncertainty, which is vital for power system planning, scheduling, control, and operation. However, it is challenging to obtain accurate wind speed forecasting results since wind speed series contain complex fluctuations. In this paper, a novel wind speed forecasting model is proposed by using a genetic algorithm (GA) and long short-term memory neural network (LSTM), where GA is used for evolving the architectures and hyper-parameters of the LSTM, called EvLSTM, because there is no clear knowledge to determine these crucial parameters. In the proposed EvLSTM forecasting model, a flexible gene encoding strategy, crossover operation, and mutation operation are proposed to describe the different architectures and hyper-parameters of the LSTM during the evolutionary process. In addition, to overcome the weakness of the single method for wind speed forecasting, the ensemble EvLSTM (EnEvLSTM) is proposed by using the no negative constraint theory ensemble learning strategy, whose weight coefficients are determined by the differential evolution algorithm. The proposed EvLSTM and EnEvLSTM forecasting models are evaluated on two real-world wind farms located in Inner Mongolia, China and Sotavento Galicia, Spain. Experimental results on two forecasting horizons demonstrate the superiority of EvLSTM and EnEvLSTM in terms of three performance indices and three statistical tests.