A Short-Term Photovoltaic Power Generation Forecast Method Based on LSTM

Abstract

The intermittence and fluctuation of photovoltaic power generation seriously affect output power reliability, efficiency, fault detection of photovoltaic power grid, etc. The precise forecasting of photovoltaic power generation is the critical method to solve the above limitations. Current photovoltaic power generation forecasting methods generally usually adopt meteorological data and historical continuous photovoltaic power generation as inputs, but they do not take into account historical periodic photovoltaic power generation as inputs, which makes the existing methods inadequate in learning time correlation. Therefore, to further study the time correlation for improving the prediction accuracy, an LSTM-FC deep learning algorithm composed of long-term short-term memory (LSTM) and fully connected (FC) layers is proposed. The double-branch input of the model enables it not only to consider the impact of meteorological data on power generation but also to consider time continuity and periodic dependence, thereby improving the prediction accuracy to a certain extent. In this paper, meteorological data, historical continuous data, and historical periodic data are used as experimental data, and these three types of data are combined into different input forms to evaluate and compare LSTM-FC with other baseline models, including support vector machines (SVM), gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT), generalized regression neural network (GRNN), feedforward neural network (FFNN), and LSTM. The simulation results show that the accuracy of the models with meteorological data, continuous data, and periodic data as input is higher than that of other input forms, and the accuracy of LSTM-FC is the highest among these models, and its root mean square error (RMSE) is 11.79% higher than that of SVM.