New energy power generation has become the first choice for low-carbon reform in the energy industry due to its emission reduction characteristics and environmental friendliness. However, due to the fluctuating nature of renewable energy, sustaining consistent reliability and secure performance within the power network has become increasingly challenging. A novel ensemble prediction scheme for photovoltaic (PV) output is presented, leveraging multi-source environmental data fusion to enhance forecast precision. The relationship between environmental variables and PV generation is quantitatively assessed using Pearson’s correlation coefficient to isolate the most influential factors. Subsequently, the PV time-series data are decomposed via variational mode decomposition (VMD) to extract multi-scale dynamic patterns. The refined features are then utilized within a long short-term memory (LSTM) network, whose parameters are adaptively optimized by the zebra optimization algorithm (ZOA). Historical datasets comprising environmental observations and corresponding PV generation records from a representative power station serve as the empirical basis. Results reveal that the VMD-ZOA-LSTM framework achieves the lowest RMSE and MAE, reducing errors by over 50% relative to comparative models. Furthermore, its R2 metric outperforms that of the baseline LSTM and VMD-LSTM configurations by 2.05% and 1.19%, respectively, thereby substantiating the efficiency and validity of the proposed modeling strategy.
Qin et al. (Sat,) studied this question.