Enhance Unobservable Solar Generation Estimation via Constructive Generative Adversarial Networks

Power distribution grids experiences proliferation of solar photovoltaics (PV) at the system edge. However, its counterpart of sparse meter deployment provides insufficient monitoring of PVs, for which the potential violations challenge the operators for energy management and stable operation. Some previous works use satellite imagery to detect distributed PVs for the easy access of data. However, their PV localization methods rely on label-rich area with unitary background/environment to implement well; even further/harder, they do not provide precise metered-PV detection and quantification to estimate/know PV generation outputs in unobservable area, which is essential to prevent the edge from excessive two-way power flow and other violations. Thus, we combine the two steps of detecting PV existence and quantify PV amount into one classification task. To boost the classification performance in unobservable edge area, we construct a generative adversarial network that simultaneous augments the diversity of labelled PV satellite images and embed distinct PV characteristics/features for training the classifier. Furthermore, the PV localization and quantification result is combined with geographic information, historical weather conditions and neighboring generation patterns to estimate power output at the system edge. We validate the proposed approaches on PV systems in the southwest of the U.S. Experiment results show high accuracy and robustness in predicting distributed solar power without sufficient prior information.