Assessment of Different Deep Learning Methods of Power Generation Forecasting for Solar PV System

Abstract

An increase in renewable energy injected into the power system will directly cause a fluctuation in the overall voltage and frequency of the power system. Thus, renewable energy prediction accuracy becomes vital to maintaining good power dispatch efficiency and power grid operation security. This article compares the one-day-ahead PV power forecasting results of three models paired with three groups of weather data. Since the number, loss, and matching problem of weather data will all influence the training results of the model, a pre-processing data framework is proposed to solve the problem in this study. The models used are a deep learning algorithm-based artificial neural network (ANN), long short-term memory (LSTM), and gated recurrent unit (GRU). The weather data groups are Central Weather Bureau (CWB), local weather station (LWS), and hybrid data (the combination of CWB and LWS data). Compared to the other two groups, hybrid data showed a 5–8% improvement in measurements. In addition, when it comes to different weather conditions, the advantages of the LSTM model were highlighted. After further analysis, the LSTM model combined with hybrid data showed the most accurate measurements, which was proved through forecasting results for one month. Finally, the results indicate that when the amount of data is limited, using hybrid data and the five weather features is helpful for training the model. Accordingly, the proposed model shows better one-day-ahead PV forecasting.

Keywords

• deep learning (DL)
• forecasting
• neural network
• renewable energy
• solar power generation