Short-term PV power forecast using hybrid deep learning model and Variational Mode Decomposition

In recent decades, the dramatic transformation from conventional energy to renewables, such as photovoltaic (PV), has been extensively occurred to address the increasing electricity demand and environmental issues. Nevertheless, the operation of PV systems is adversely affected by the intermittence of meteorological factors, such as solar irradiance. Therefore, accurate PV power generation forecast has played a vital role to stimulate the integration of renewable energy sources into the power grid. This study proposes a novel scheme for short-term PV power forecast based on Transformer Neural Network (TransNN) integrated with Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). In addition, Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) is adopted in the data pre-processing stage to enhance the forecast accuracy. The performance of the proposed model is validated utilizing two real-world datasets, and five benchmark models are dedicated to forecast outcome comparison. The predicted results indicated the superiority of the proposed model compared to the referenced models by achieving the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) values under 1 kW in all cases.