Comparing Neural Network Models for Photovoltaic Power Generation Prediction

Abstract

Research on alternative energy sources has been increasing for the past years due to environmental concerns and the depletion of fossil fuels. Since photovoltaic generation is intermittent, one needs to predict solar incidence to alleviate problems due to demand surges in conventional distribution systems.Many works have used Long Short-Term Memory (LSTMs) to predict generation. However, to minimize computational costs related to retraining and inference, LSTMs might not be optimal. Therefore, in this work, we compare the performance of MLP (Multilayer Perceptron), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and LSTMs for the task mentioned above. We used the solar radiance measured throughout 2020 in the city of Maceió (Brazil), taking into account periods of 2 hours for training to predict the next 5-minutes. Hyperparameters were fine-tuned using an optimization approach based on Bayesian inference to promote a fair comparison. Results showed that the MLP has satisfactory performance, requiring much less time to train and forecast. Such results can contribute, for example, to improving response time in embedded systems.