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

We develop a probabilistic framework for joint simulation of short-term electricity generation from renewable assets. In this paper we describe a method for producing hourly day-ahead scenarios of generated power at grid-scale across hundreds of assets. These scenarios are conditional on specified forecasts and yield a full uncertainty quantification both at the marginal asset-level and across asset collections. Our simulation pipeline first applies asset calibration to norma...

Spatio-temporal problems exist in many areas of knowledge and disciplines ranging from biology to engineering and physics. However, solution strategies based on classical statistical techniques often fall short due to the large number of parameters that are to be estimated and the huge amount of data that need to be handled. In this paper we apply known techniques in a novel way to provide a framework for spatio-temporal modeling which is both computationally efficient and ha...

Short-term forecasting of solar photovoltaic energy (PV) production is important for powerplant management. Ideally these forecasts are equipped with error bars, so that downstream decisions can account for uncertainty. To produce predictions with error bars in this setting, we consider Gaussian processes (GPs) for modelling and predicting solar photovoltaic energy production in the UK. A standard application of GP regression on the PV timeseries data is infeasible due to the...

Load forecasts have become an integral part of energy security. Due to the various influencing factors that can be considered in such a forecast, there is also a wide range of models that attempt to integrate these parameters into a system in various ways. Due to the growing importance of probabilistic load forecast models, different approaches are presented in this analysis. The focus is on different models from the short-term sector. After that, another model from the long-...

We summarise the main results from a number of our recent articles on the subject of probabilistic temperature forecasting.

We present a first study of Bayesian forecasting of electricity prices traded on the German continuous intraday market which fully incorporates parameter uncertainty. Our target variable is the IDFull price index, forecasts are given in terms of posterior predictive distributions. For validation we use the exceedingly volatile electricity prices of 2022, which have hardly been the subject of forecasting studies before. As a benchmark model, we use all available intraday trans...

The increasing importance of solar power for electricity generation leads to an increasing demand for probabilistic forecasting of local and aggregated PV yields. In this paper we use an indirect modeling approach for hourly medium to long term local PV yields based on publicly available irradiation data. We suggest a time series model for global horizontal irradiation for which it is easy to generate an arbitrary number of scenarios and thus allows for multivariate probabili...

Rising penetration levels of (residential) photovoltaic (PV) power as distributed energy resource pose a number of challenges to the electricity infrastructure. High quality, general tools to provide accurate forecasts of power production are urgently needed. In this article, we propose a supervised deep learning model for end-to-end forecasting of PV power production. The proposed model is based on two seminal concepts that led to significant performance improvements of deep...

Solar energy supply is usually highly volatile which limits its integration in the power grid. Accurate probabilistic intraday forecasts of solar resources are essential to increase the share of photovoltaic (PV) energy in the grid and enable cost-efficient balancing of power demand and supply. Solar PV production mainly depends on downwelling surface solar radiation (SSR). By estimating SSR from geostationary satellites, we can cover large areas with high spatial and tempora...

The high penetration of volatile renewable energy sources such as solar make methods for coping with the uncertainty associated with them of paramount importance. Probabilistic forecasts are an example of these methods, as they assist energy planners in their decision-making process by providing them with information about the uncertainty of future power generation. Currently, there is a trend towards the use of deep learning probabilistic forecasting methods. However, the po...