Deep Learning Models for PV Power Forecasting: Review

Abstract

Accurate forecasting of photovoltaic (PV) power is essential for grid scheduling and energy management. In recent years, deep learning technology has made significant progress in time-series forecasting, offering new solutions for PV power forecasting. This study provides a systematic review of deep learning models for PV power forecasting, concentrating on comparisons of the features, advantages, and limitations of different model architectures. First, we analyze the commonly used datasets for PV power forecasting. Additionally, we provide an overview of mainstream deep learning model architectures, including multilayer perceptron (MLP), recurrent neural networks (RNN), convolutional neural networks (CNN), and graph neural networks (GNN), and explain their fundamental principles and technical features. Moreover, we systematically organize the research progress of deep learning models based on different architectures for PV power forecasting. This study indicates that different deep learning model architectures have their own advantages in PV power forecasting. MLP models have strong nonlinear fitting capabilities, RNN models can capture long-term dependencies, CNN models can automatically extract local features, and GNN models have unique advantages for modeling spatiotemporal characteristics. This manuscript provides a comprehensive research survey for PV power forecasting using deep learning models, helping researchers and practitioners to gain a deeper understanding of the current applications, challenges, and opportunities of deep learning technology in this area.