Forecasting Photovoltaic Power Production using a Deep Learning Sequence to Sequence Model with Attention

TL;DR

This paper introduces a deep learning sequence-to-sequence model with attention for PV power forecasting, leveraging weather data and historical measurements to improve accuracy over existing methods.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel end-to-end deep learning model using sequence-to-sequence architecture and attention mechanism for PV power prediction, outperforming traditional models.

Findings

Model achieves higher forecast skill scores than baseline approaches.

Utilizes probabilistic forecasts over time intervals, enhancing prediction quality.

Performs at or above current state-of-the-art PV forecasting methods.

Abstract

Rising penetration levels of (residential) photovoltaic (PV) power as distributed energy resource pose a number of challenges to the electricity infrastructure. High quality, general tools to provide accurate forecasts of power production are urgently needed. In this article, we propose a supervised deep learning model for end-to-end forecasting of PV power production. The proposed model is based on two seminal concepts that led to significant performance improvements of deep learning approaches in other sequence-related fields, but not yet in the area of time series prediction: the sequence to sequence architecture and attention mechanism as a context generator. The proposed model leverages numerical weather predictions and high-resolution historical measurements to forecast a binned probability distribution over the prognostic time intervals, rather than the expected values of the prognostic variable. This design offers significant performance improvements compared to common baseline approaches, such as fully connected neural networks and one-block long short-term memory architectures. Using normalized root mean square error based forecast skill score as a performance indicator, the proposed approach is compared to other models. The results show that the new design performs at or above the current state of the art of PV power forecasting.