Deep learning based photovoltaic generation on time series load forecasting

Abstract

In recent years, solar irradiance forecasting has become essential to managing, developing, and effectively integrating photovoltaic (PV) systems properly into the smart grid. The foundation of a conventional variational autoencoder (VAE) is an entirely coupled layer that includes both decoder and encoder components. In this study, a novel deep attention-driven model for forecasting named bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) which is combined with the VAE model is introduced as an enhanced version of the VAE. BiLSTM is integrated at the encoder side of VAE to effectively extract and learn temporal dependencies that are embedded in the panel irradiance data. Additionally, a self-attention mechanism (SAM) is added to bilateral variational autoencoder (BiVAE) which is known as BiVAE-SAM that highlights the important characteristics. The proposed BiVAE-SAM permits the VAE’s capacity to design the temporal dependency. The examined models are assessed using sun irradiance measurements from New York City, Turkey, Canopy, Los Angeles, California, and Florida. The outcomes exhibit that the proposed BiVAE-SAM model performs better mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) with values of 1.7935, 0.7828, 1.3491 and 2.8346 respectively for California, Los Angeles, New York City, and Florida, over existing stacked denoising auto-encoders (SDA) model at projecting solar irradiance.