Real-time solar PV generation in a building using LSTM-based time series forecasting

Abstract

The increasing demand for renewable energy has forced the researchers to lay importance on studying the behavior of these sources by monitoring the operational data and performing data analysis. The application of data analytics to renewable energy is one of the most powerful methods to maintain the system's reliability and stability. As the power system becomes more complex the necessity to perform data analytics also increases. When data analytic techniques are applied to solar energy generations through Photovoltaic (PV) dataset, the possible behavior of PV generation performance which is affected by changes in environmental conditions can be predicted and further analytical approaches allow us to detect possible PV panel and inverter failures. This paper is an attempt towards applying the intelligent data analytics approaches to solar PV generation of a real-time photovoltaic plant. The main purpose of the data analytics platform is to analyze the energy yield, assess the PV system performance, and forecast solar PV generation. In this article, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) machine learning model is developed to assess and interpret the available information from the gathered data of the PV plant. The proposed model is a sequence-to-sequence regression-based forecasting model which performs time series forecasting in a real-time 100 kW PV plant in the University building of SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Kattankulathur, Tamilnadu.