A Selective Ensemble Approach for Accuracy Improvement and Computational Load Reduction in ANN-Based PV Power Forecasting

Day-ahead power forecasting is an effective way to deal with the challenges of increased penetration of photovoltaic power into the electric grid, due to its non-programmable nature. This is significantly beneficial for smart grid and micro-grids application. Machine learning and hybrid approaches are well assessed techniques, able to provide effective forecasting with a data-driven approach based on previous measurements from existing power plants. Ensemble methods can be employed to increase solar power forecasting accuracy, by running several independent forecasting models in parallel. In this paper, a novel selective approach is proposed and assessed, where independently trained neural networks are evaluated in terms of accuracy, in order to properly select a suitable forecasting. Moreover, in order to reduce the associated computational burden, suitably developed new normalization approaches are proposed and evaluated. The considered experimental case study shows that the combination of the proposed procedures is able to increase accuracy and to mitigate the overall computational load, resulting in a simple and lightweight algorithm. Additionally, a comparison with other commonly used techniques has shown that the proposed approach is robust with respect to dataset limited size and discontinuities.