Short-term Solar Power Prediction Learning Directly from Satellite Images with Regions of Interest

Developing solar power generation technology is an efficient approach to relieving the global environmental crisis. However, solar energy is an energy source with strong uncertainty, which restricts large-scale photovoltaic (PV) applications until accurate solar energy predictions can be achieved. PV power forecasting methods have been widely researched based on existing predictions of satellite-derived solar irradiance, whereas modeling cloud motion directly from satellite images is still a tough task. In this study, an end-to-end short-term forecasting model is proposed to take satellite images as inputs, and it can learn the cloud motion characteristics from stacked optical flow maps. In order to reduce the huge size of measurements, static regions of interest (ROIs) are scoped based on historical cloud velocities. With its well-designed deep learning architecture, the proposed model can output multi-step-ahead prediction results sequentially by shifting receptive attention to dynamic ROIs. According to comparisons with related studies, the proposed model outperforms persistence and derived methods, and enhances its learning capability relative to conventional learning models via the novel architecture. The model can be applied to PV plants or arrays in different areas, suitable for forecast horizons within three hours.