Short-Term Photovoltaic Generation Forecasting Using Multiple Heterogenous Sources of Data

Abstract

Renewable Energies (RES) penetration is progressing rapidly: in France, the installed capacity of photovoltaic (PV) power rose from 26MW in 2007 to 8GW in 2017 [1]. Power generated by PV plants being highly dependent on variable weather conditions, this ever-growing pace is raising issues regarding grid stability and revenue optimization. To overcome these obstacles, PV forecasting became an area of intense research. In this paper, we propose a low complexity forecasting model able to operate with multiple heterogenous sources of data (power measurements, satellite images and Numerical Weather Predictions (NWP)). Being non-parametric, this model can be extended to include inputs. The main strength of the proposed model lies in its ability to automatically select the optimal sources of data according to the desired forecast horizon (from 15min to 6h ahead) thanks to a feature selection procedure. To take advantage of the growing number of PV plants, a Spatio-Temporal (ST) approach is implemented. This approach considers the dependencies between spatially distributed plants. Each source has been studied incrementally so as to quantify their impact on forecast performances. This plurality of sources enhances the forecasting performances up to 40% in terms of RMSE compared to a reference model. The evaluation process is carried out on nine PV plants from the Compagnie Nationale du Rhone (CNR).