Solar Energy Production Forecasting Based on a Hybrid CNN-LSTM-Transformer Model

Green energy is very important for developing new cities with high energy consumption, in addition to helping environment preservation. Integrating solar energy into a grid is very challenging and requires precise forecasting of energy production. Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence have been very promising. Particularly, Deep Learning technologies have achieved great results in short-term time-series forecasting. Thus, it is very suitable to use these techniques for solar energy production forecasting. In this work, a combination of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network, and a Transformer was used for solar energy production forecasting. Besides, a clustering technique was applied for the correlation analysis of the input data. Relevant features in the historical data were selected using a self-organizing map. The hybrid CNN-LSTM-Transformer model was used for forecasting. The Fingrid open dataset was used for training and evaluating the proposed model. The experimental results demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed model in solar energy production forecasting. Compared to existing models and other combinations, such as LSTM-CNN, the proposed CNN-LSTM-Transformer model achieved the highest accuracy. The achieved results show that the proposed model can be used as a trusted forecasting technique that facilitates the integration of solar energy into grids.