# Generative Adversarial Networks for Operational Scenario Planning of Renewable Energy Farms: A Study on Wind and Photovoltaic

## TL;DR

This study evaluates the effectiveness of GANs, especially Wasserstein GANs, in modeling renewable energy production scenarios for wind and solar farms, aiding grid stability analysis with limited data.

## Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of GAN variants and demonstrates GANs' ability to model complex, terrain-specific power distributions with limited datasets.

## Key findings

- Wasserstein GAN outperforms other models in capturing spatial-temporal relations.
- GANs effectively model terrain-specific power distributions.
- Limited data still allows GANs to generate realistic renewable energy scenarios.

## Abstract

For the integration of renewable energy sources, power grid operators need realistic information about the effects of energy production and consumption to assess grid stability. Recently, research in scenario planning benefits from utilizing generative adversarial networks (GANs) as generative models for operational scenario planning. In these scenarios, operators examine temporal as well as spatial influences of different energy sources on the grid. The analysis of how renewable energy resources affect the grid enables the operators to evaluate the stability and to identify potential weak points such as a limiting transformer. However, due to their novelty, there are limited studies on how well GANs model the underlying power distribution. This analysis is essential because, e.g., especially extreme situations with low or high power generation are required to evaluate grid stability. We conduct a comparative study of the Wasserstein distance, binary-cross-entropy loss, and a Gaussian copula as the baseline applied on two wind and two solar datasets with limited data compared to previous studies. Both GANs achieve good results considering the limited amount of data, but the Wasserstein GAN is superior in modeling temporal and spatial relations, and the power distribution. Besides evaluating the generated power distribution over all farms, it is essential to assess terrain specific distributions for wind scenarios. These terrain specific power distributions affect the grid by their differences in their generating power magnitude. Therefore, in a second study, we show that even when simultaneously learning distributions from wind parks with terrain specific patterns, GANs are capable of modeling these individualities also when faced with limited data.