Design and development of a short-term photovoltaic power output forecasting method based on Random Forest, Deep Neural Network and LSTM using readily available weather features

Renewable energy sources (RES) are an essential part of building a more sustainable future, with higher diversity of clean energy, reduced emissions and less dependence on finite fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas. The advancements in the renewable energy sources domain bring higher hardware efficiency and lower costs, which improves the likelihood of wider RES adoption. However, integrating renewables such as photovoltaic (PV) systems in the current grid is still a major challenge. The main reason is the volatile, intermittent nature of RES, which increases the complexity of the grid management and maintenance. Having access to accurate PV power output forecasting could reduce the number of power supply disruptions, improve the planning of the available and reserve capacities and decrease the management and operational costs. In this context, this paper explores and evaluates three Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods - random forest (RF), deep neural network (DNN) and long short-term memory network (LSTM), which are applied for the task of short-term PV output power forecasting. Following a statistical forecasting approach, the selected models are trained on weather and PV output data collected in Berlin, Germany. The assembled data set contains predominantly broadly accessible weather features, which makes the proposed approach more cost efficient and easily applicable even for geographic locations without access to specialized hardware or hard-to-obtain input features. The performance achieved by two of the selected algorithms indicates that the RF and the DNN models are able to generate accurate solar power forecasts and are also able to handle sudden changes and shifts in the PV power output.