Achieving wind power and photovoltaic power prediction: An intelligent prediction system based on a deep learning approach

Abstract

Accurately predicting wind and photovoltaic power is one of the keys to improving the economy of wind-solar complementary power generation system, reducing scheduling costs and no-load losses, and ensuring grid stability. However, the natural properties of energy result in complex fluctuations in their corresponding power sequences, making accurate predictions difficult. Therefore, this paper proposes an intelligent prediction system that combines decomposition algorithms and deep learning for ultra-short-term prediction of wind and photovoltaic power. First, an improved decomposition algorithm is proposed, based on fuzzy entropy's property that its value increases with the increase of sequence uncertainty, particle swarm optimization (PSO) is used to search for the optimal parameter combinations of variational modal decomposition (VMD), so that it can automatically adjust the parameters for energy data with different characteristics to reduce the human error. Then, a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that balances operational efficiency and prediction performance is constructed, and the hyperparameters of the CNN are optimized using the wild horse optimization algorithm (WHO) to improve the stability and accuracy of the prediction model. In this paper, real data from wind power plants and photovoltaic power plants in China are used as experimental objects, and experiments are carried out in three aspects, namely, benchmark model selection, decomposition algorithm comparison and combined model comparison. The results show that selecting CNN as the benchmark model is a good choice; the improved VMD has better decomposition performance than other state-of-the-art decomposition algorithms. The system proposed in this paper is highly generalizable and adaptive, and its prediction performance and accuracy greatly outperform that of other comparative models, with prediction accuracies improved by 72% and 79%, respectively, compared to a single CNN model.