Deep and Machine Learning Models to Forecast Photovoltaic Power Generation

Sergio Cantillo-Luna, Ricardo Moreno-Chuquen, David Celeita, George Anders

The integration and management of distributed energy resources (DERs), including residential photovoltaic (PV) production, coupled with the widespread use of enabling technologies such as artificial intelligence, have led to the emergence of new tools, market models, and business opportunities. The accurate forecasting of these resources has become crucial to decision making, despite data availability and reliability issues in some parts of the world. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a deep and machine learning-based methodology for PV power forecasting, which includes XGBoost, random forest, support vector regressor, multi-layer perceptron, and LSTM-based tuned models, and introduces the ConvLSTM1D approach for this task. These models were evaluated on the univariate time-series prediction of low-volume residential PV production data across various forecast horizons. The proposed benchmarking and analysis approach considers technical and economic impacts, which can provide valuable insights for decision-making tools with these resources. The results indicate that the random forest and ConvLSTM1D model approaches yielded the most accurate forecasting performance, as demonstrated by the lowest RMSE, MAPE, and MAE across the different scenarios proposed.