Area Day‐Ahead Photovoltaic Energy Generation Forecasting by Auto‐Encoder Inputting Images of Multiple Meteorological Elements

Abstract

Photovoltaics (PV), which is one of variable renewable energies, have been installed largely. In the environment of largely installed PV, the output fluctuates of PV influences on the operation of power gird network adversely. Therefore, PV energy generation forecasting is valid for power grid operation and management and needs the reduction of large forecast error as well as average error. Due to a day‐ahead forecast of the total PV energy generation in the power grid area, we developed the forecasting method by using meteorological forecast data of many points in the target area. In order to forecast the regional PV energy generation, the proposed method uses auto‐encoder and convolutional neural network (CNN) for extracting requirements and valid data, and forecast with neural network (NN) by means of extracted information. In this paper, we improved the forecasting error by using multiple meteorological elements as input data. As a result, we indicated that using both of global horizontal irradiance and low cloud cover is required for the reginal PV energy generation forecasting, and large forecasting error can be reduced by adding either dew point depression, or cumulative precipitation as input data. © 2024 Institute of Electrical Engineer of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC.