A Hybrid Convolutional–Long Short-Term Memory–Attention Framework for Short-Term Photovoltaic Power Forecasting, Incorporating Data from Neighboring Stations

To enhance the safety of grid operations, this paper proposes a high-precision short-term photovoltaic (PV) power forecasting method that integrates information from surrounding PV stations and deep learning prediction models. The proposed method utilizes numerical weather prediction (NWP) data of the target PV station and highly correlated features from nearby stations as inputs. This study first analyzes the correlation between irradiance and power sequences and calculates a comprehensive similarity index based on distance factors. Stations with high-similarity indices are selected as data sources. Subsequently, Bayesian optimization is employed to determine the optimal data fusion ratio. The selected data are then used to model power predictions through the convolutional long short-term memory with attention (Conv-LSTM-ATT) deep neural network. Experimental results show that the proposed model significantly outperforms three classical models in terms of forecasting accuracy. The data fusion strategy determined by Bayesian optimization reduces the root mean square error (RMSE) of the test set by 20.04%, 28.24%, and 30.94% under sunny, cloudy, and rainy conditions, respectively.