Solar Power Prediction Using Dual Stream CNN-LSTM Architecture

The integration of solar energy with a power system brings great economic and environmental benefits. However, the high penetration of solar power is challenging due to the operation and planning of the existing power system owing to the intermittence and randomicity of solar power generation. Achieving accurate predictions for power generation is important to provide high-quality electric energy for end-users. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a deep learning-based dual-stream convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term nemory (LSTM) network followed by a self-attention mechanism network (DSCLANet). Here, CNN is used to learn spatial patterns and LSTM is incorporated for temporal feature extraction. The output spatial and temporal feature vectors are then fused, followed by a self-attention mechanism to select optimal features for further processing. Finally, fully connected layers are incorporated for short-term solar power prediction. The performance of DSCLANet is evaluated on DKASC Alice Spring solar datasets, and it reduces the error rate up to 0.0136 MSE, 0.0304 MAE, and 0.0458 RMSE compared to recent state-of-the-art methods.