Photovoltaic Power Forecasting With a Hybrid Deep Learning Approach

Solar energy is the key to clean energy, which can generate large amounts of electricity for the future smart grid. Unfortunately, the randomness and intermittency of solar energy resources bring difficulties to the stable operation and management of the power systems. To reduce the negative impact of photovoltaic (PV) plants accessing on the power systems, it is great significant to predict PV power accurately. In light of this, we propose a hybrid deep learning approach based on convolutional neural network (CNN) and long-short term memory recurrent neural network (LSTM) for the PV output power forecasting. The CNN model is leveraged to discover the nonlinear features and invariant structures exhibited in the previous output power data, thereby facilitating the prediction of PV power. The LSTM is used to model the temporal changes in the latest PV data, and predict the PV power of next time step. Then, the prediction results in the two models are comprehensively considered to obtain the expected output power. The proposed approach is extensively evaluated on real PV data in Limberg, Belgium, and numerical results demonstrate that the proposed approach can provide good prediction performance in PV systems.