A Simplified LSTM Neural Networks for One Day-Ahead Solar Power Forecasting

In recent years, exploration and exploitation of renewable energies are turning a new chapter toward the development of energy policy, technology and business ecosystem in all the countries. Distributed energy resources (DERs) are being largely interconnected to electrical power grids. This dispersed and intermittent generational mixes bring technical and economic challenges to the power systems in terms of operations, stability, reliability, interoperability and the policy making. In additional, DERs cause the significant impacts to the operation of traditional centralized generation power plants and the dispatch control centers. Under such circumstances, the accuracy of DERs power forecasting is one of the critical problems for TSO and DSO such as unit commitment, smooth fluctuations, peak load shifting, demand response, etc. In this paper, a simplified LSTM algorithm built over the architecture of Machine Learning methodology to forecast one day-ahead solar power generation is introduced. Through the machine learning processes of data processing, model fitting, cross validation, metrics evaluation and hyperparameters tuning, the result shows that the proposed simplified LSTM model outperform the MLP model. Moreover, the forecast of LSTM model can successfully capture intra-hour ramping on different weather scenarios. The average RMSE is 0.512 which is quite promising to inspire that the proposed methodology and architecture can best fit the short-term solar power forecasting applications.