Decomposition aided attention-based recurrent neural networks for multistep ahead time-series forecasting of renewable power generation

Renewable energy plays an increasingly important role in our future. As fossil fuels become more difficult to extract and effectively process, renewables offer a solution to the ever-increasing energy demands of the world. However, the shift toward renewable energy is not without challenges. While fossil fuels offer a more reliable means of energy storage that can be converted into usable energy, renewables are more dependent on external factors used for generation. Efficient storage of renewables is more difficult often relying on batteries that have a limited number of charge cycles. A robust and efficient system for forecasting power generation from renewable sources can help alleviate some of the difficulties associated with the transition toward renewable energy. Therefore, this study proposes an attention-based recurrent neural network approach for forecasting power generated from renewable sources. To help networks make more accurate forecasts, decomposition techniques utilized applied the time series, and a modified metaheuristic is introduced to optimized hyperparameter values of the utilized networks. This approach has been tested on two real-world renewable energy datasets covering both solar and wind farms. The models generated by the introduced metaheuristics were compared with those produced by other state-of-the-art optimizers in terms of standard regression metrics and statistical analysis. Finally, the best-performing model was interpreted using SHapley Additive exPlanations.