The inherently non-dispatchable nature of renewable sources, such as solar photovoltaic, is regarded as one of the main challenges hindering their massive integration in existing electric grids. Accurate forecasting of the power output of the solar plant might therefore play a key role towards this goal. In this paper, we compare several machine learning and deep learning algorithms for intra-hour forecasting of the output power of a 1 MW photovoltaic plant, using meteorological data acquired in the field. With the best performing algorithms, our data-driven workflow provided prediction performance that compares well with the present state of the art and could be applied in an industrial setting.

Machine learning models have become widespread in materials science research. An open‐access and community‐driven database containing over 40000 perovskite photovoltaic devices was recently published. This resource enables the application of predictive data‐driven models to correlate device structure with photovoltaic performance, whereas the literature usually focused on specific device layers. In this work the concept of device‐level performance prediction is explored using gradient boosted regression trees as the core algorithm and Shapley values analysis to interpret and rationalize the results. The main pitfalls and conceptual limitations of the approach are discussed and correlated with the database structure and dimension, by comparing the performance of different choices of descriptors and dataset size. Evidence suggests that the additional features introduced in this work, in particular chemical descriptors of perovskite additives, can boost regression performance at a device level. A specific model is finally trained to predict the performance of unseen devices and tested on experimental data from the literature. This task is found to be particularly challenging, as the ability of the model to generalize to a new chemical space is limited by several factors, including the amount and the quality of available data.This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.