Probabilistic Forecasting of Temporal Trajectories of Regional Power Production - Part 2: Photovoltaic Solar

Renewable energy sources provide a constantly increasing contribution to the total energy production worldwide. However, the power generation from these sources is highly variable due to their dependence on meteorological conditions. Accurate forecasts for the production at various temporal and spatial scales are thus needed for an efficiently operating electricity market. In this article - part 1 - we propose fully probabilistic prediction models for spatially aggregated win...

In the probabilistic energy forecasting literature, emphasis is mainly placed on deriving marginal predictive densities for which each random variable is dealt with individually. Such marginals description is sufficient for power systems related operational problems if and only if optimal decisions are to be made for each lead-time and each location independently of each other. However, many of these operational processes are temporally and spatially coupled, while uncertaint...

The output of solar power generation is significantly dependent on the available solar radiation. Thus, with the proliferation of PV generation in the modern power grid, forecasting of solar irradiance is vital for proper operation of the grid. To achieve an improved accuracy in prediction performance, this paper discusses a Bayesian treatment of probabilistic forecasting. The approach is demonstrated using publicly available data obtained from the Florida Automated Weather N...

In order to enable the transition towards renewable energy sources, probabilistic energy forecasting is of critical importance for incorporating volatile power sources such as solar energy into the electrical grid. Solar energy forecasting methods often aim to provide probabilistic predictions of solar irradiance. In particular, many hybrid approaches combine physical information from numerical weather prediction models with statistical methods. Even though the physical model...

Photovoltaic (PV) power is affected by weather conditions, making the power generated from the PV systems uncertain. Solving this problem would help improve the reliability and cost effectiveness of the grid, and could help reduce reliance on fossil fuel plants. The present paper focuses on evaluating predictions of the energy generated by PV systems in the United Kingdom Gaussian process regression (GPR). Gaussian process regression is a Bayesian non-parametric model that ca...

With increasing concerns of climate change, renewable resources such as photovoltaic (PV) have gained popularity as a means of energy generation. The smooth integration of such resources in power system operations is enabled by accurate forecasting mechanisms that address their inherent intermittency and variability. This paper proposes a probabilistic framework to predict short-term PV output taking into account the uncertainty of weather. To this end, we make use of dataset...

The ability to accurately forecast power generation from renewable sources is nowadays recognised as a fundamental skill to improve the operation of power systems. Despite the general interest of the power community in this topic, it is not always simple to compare different forecasting methodologies, and infer the impact of single components in providing accurate predictions. In this paper we extensively compare simple forecasting methodologies with more sophisticated ones o...

Accurate intraday forecasts of the power output by PhotoVoltaic (PV) systems are critical to improve the operation of energy distribution grids. We describe a neural autoregressive model which aims at performing such intraday forecasts. We build upon a physical, deterministic PV performance model, the output of which being used as covariates in the context of the neural model. In addition, our application data relates to a geographically distributed set of PV systems. We addr...

Probabilistic forecasts of renewable energy production provide users with valuable information about the uncertainty associated with the expected generation. Current state-of-the-art forecasts for solar irradiance have focused on producing reliable \emph{point} forecasts. The additional information included in probabilistic forecasts may be paramount for decision makers to efficiently make use of this uncertain and variable generation. In this paper, a stochastic differential...

We design a Gaussian Process (GP) spatiotemporal model to capture features of day-ahead wind power forecasts. We work with hourly-scale day-ahead forecasts across hundreds of wind farm locations, with the main aim of constructing a fully probabilistic joint model across space and hours of the day. To this end, we design a separable space-time kernel, implementing both temporal and spatial input warping to capture the non-stationarity in the covariance of wind power. We conduc...