Real-Time Solar Power Estimation Through RNN-Based Attention Models

Abstract

Solar power is an important renewable energy resource that plays a pivotal role in replacing fossil fuel generators and lowering carbon emissions. Since sunlight, which is highly dependent on meteorological factors, is highly volatile, the difficulty in collecting real-time data from renewable energy power plants poses a major threat to maintaining the stability of the entire power system in the target area. A high-performance wireless metering modem is required to monitor the renewable energy generation power of the entire target area in real-time. However, installing such devices on all sites is expensive, so we propose a system that uses deep learning to estimate the generation power of a target site based on the power generations of some sample sites. We use clustering and distance-based sampling to extract a sample site corresponding to each target site and use the recurrent neural network (RNN)-based attention techniques to estimate the generation of target sites from the sample sites. Our experiments show that the proposed RNN-based attention models significantly improve estimation accuracy compared to the baseline model or other deep learning models, irrespective of the number or location of sample sites.INDEX TERMS deep learning, real-time estimation, attention, long short-term memory, solar power generation estimation.