A Cross-Modal Generative Adversarial Network for Scenarios Generation of Renewable Energy

Abstract

Scenarios data of renewable energy resources plays an essential role in the study of mitigating the risk in the power system due to their intermittent nature. Existing researches have mainly focused on how to generate high-quality time series based scenarios with corrupted or missing observed data. However, the multimodality of renewable energy resources is largely ignored from the perspective of the spatial-temporal correlation which can significantly strengthen the renewable energy prediction and optimization. To make full use of these multi-modal data and further improve the data quality of scenarios, a cross-modal Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) model is proposed with the setting of two spatial-temporal transformer models. In cGAN, the task of scenarios generation is formulated as a probability approximation problem. Then, a cross-modal scenarios generation framework is constructed to process data from multi-modal observations. Theoretically, it can generate infinite number of uncertain scenarios data via the repeated random noise sampling technique. Extensive experiments are carried out at a NREL photovoltaic power dataset and a real-world wind power dataset, respectively. The results validate the state-of-the-art performance of cGAN, even though the validation dataset is missing at random. Moreover, the results also show that the setting of spatial-temporal transformer clearly explains the contributions of different modal data, and stabilize the training process of cGAN. Finally, a stochastic day-head economic dispatch is also studied to show the practical value of cGAN.