Performance of Deep Learning Techniques for Forecasting PV Power Generation: A Case Study on a 1.5 MWp Floating PV Power Plant

Recently, deep learning techniques have become popular and are widely employed in several research areas, such as optimization, pattern recognition, object identification, and forecasting, due to the advanced development of computer programming technologies. A significant number of renewable energy sources (RESs) as environmentally friendly sources, especially solar photovoltaic (PV) sources, have been integrated into modern power systems. However, the PV source is highly fluctuating and difficult to predict accurately for short-term PV output power generation, leading to ineffective system planning and affecting energy security. Compared to conventional predictive approaches, such as linear regression, predictive-based deep learning methods are promising in predicting short-term PV power generation with high accuracy. This paper investigates the performance of several well-known deep learning techniques to forecast short-term PV power generation in the real-site floating PV power plant of 1.5 MWp capacity at Suranaree University of Technology Hospital, Thailand. The considered deep learning techniques include single models (RNN, CNN, LSTM, GRU, BiLSTM, and BiGRU) and hybrid models (CNN-LSTM, CNN-BiLSTM, CNN-GRU, and CNN-BiGRU). Five-minute resolution data from the real floating PV power plant is used to train and test the deep learning models. Accuracy indices of MAE, MAPE, and RMSE are applied to quantify errors between actual and forecasted values obtained from the different deep learning techniques. The obtained results show that, with the same training dataset, the performance of the deep learning models differs when testing under different weather conditions and time horizons. The CNN-BiGRU model offers the best performance for one-day PV forecasting, while the BiLSTM model is the most preferable for one-week PV forecasting.