Reliable renewable energy forecasting for climate change mitigation

Abstract

Accurate prediction of electricity generation from diverse renewable energy sources (RES) plays a pivotal role in optimizing power schedules within RES, contributing to the collective effort to combat climate change. While prior research often focused on individual energy sources in isolation, neglecting intricate interactions among multiple sources, this limitation frequently leads to inaccurate estimations of total power generation. In this study, we introduce a hybrid architecture designed to address these challenges, incorporating advanced artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. The hybrid model seamlessly integrates a gated recurrent unit (GRU) and a ResNext model, and it is tuned with the modified jaya algorithm (MJA) to capture localized correlations among different energy sources. Leveraging its nonlinear time-series properties, the model integrates meteorological conditions and specific energy source data. Additionally, principal component analysis (PCA) is employed to extract linear time-series data characteristics for each energy source. Application of the proposed AI-infused approach to a renewable energy system demonstrates its effectiveness and feasibility in the context of climate change mitigation. Results reveal the superior accuracy of the hybrid framework compared to more complex models such as decision trees and ResNet. Specifically, our proposed method achieved remarkable performance, boasting the lowest error rates with a normalized RMSE of 6.51 and a normalized MAPE of 4.34 for solar photovoltaic (PV), highlighting its exceptional precision in terms of mean absolute errors. A detailed sensitivity analysis is carried out to evaluate the influence of every element in the hybrid framework, emphasizing the importance of energy correlation patterns. Comparative assessments underscore the increased accuracy and stability of the suggested AI-infused framework when compared to other methods.