Learning-based short-time prediction of photovoltaic resources for pre-emptive excursion cancellation

There is a growing interest in using renewable energy resources (RES) such as wind, solar, geothermal and biomass in power systems. The main incentives for using renewable energy resources include the growing interest in sustainable and clean generation as well as reduced fuel cost. However, the challenge with using wind and solar resources is their indeterminacy which leads to voltage and frequency excursions. In this dissertation, first, the economic dispatch (ED) problem for a community microgrid is studied which explores a community energy market. As a result of this work, the importance of modeling and predicting renewable resources is understood. Hence, a new algorithm based on dictionary learning for prediction of solar production is introduced. In this method, a dictionary is trained to carry various behaviors of the system. Prediction is performed by reconstructing the tail of the upcoming signal using this dictionary. To improve the accuracy of prediction, a new approach based on a novel clustering-based Markov Switched Autoregressive Model is proposed that is capable of predicting short-term solar production. This method extracts autoregressive features of the training data and partitions them into multiple clusters. Later, it uses the representative feature of each cluster to predict the upcoming solar production level. Additionally, a Markov jump chain is added to improve the robustness of this scheme to noise. Lastly, a method to utilize these prediction mechanisms in a preemptive model predictive control is explored. By incorporating the expected production levels, a model predictive controller is designed to preemptively cancel the upcoming excursions --Abstract, page iv

Wind Power Forecasting Methods Based on Deep Learning: A Survey

Accurate wind power forecasting in wind farm can effectively reduce the enormous impact on grid operation safety when high permeability intermittent power supply is connected to the power grid. Aiming to provide reference strategies for relevant researchers as well as practical applications, this paper attempts to provide the literature investigation and methods analysis of deep learning, enforcement learning and transfer learning in wind speed and wind power forecasting modeling. Usually, wind speed and wind power forecasting around a wind farm requires the calculation of the next moment of the definite state, which is usually achieved based on the state of the atmosphere that encompasses nearby atmospheric pressure, temperature, roughness, and obstacles. As an effective method of high-dimensional feature extraction, deep neural network can theoretically deal with arbitrary nonlinear transformation through proper structural design, such as adding noise to outputs, evolutionary learning used to optimize hidden layer weights, optimize the objective function so as to save information that can improve the output accuracy while filter out the irrelevant or less affected information for forecasting. The establishment of high-precision wind speed and wind power forecasting models is always a challenge due to the randomness, instantaneity and seasonal characteristics

An Integrated Multi-Time-Scale Modeling for Solar Irradiance Forecasting Using Deep Learning

For short-term solar irradiance forecasting, the traditional point forecasting methods are rendered less useful due to the non-stationary characteristic of solar power. The amount of operating reserves required to maintain reliable operation of the electric grid rises due to the variability of solar energy. The higher the uncertainty in the generation, the greater the operating-reserve requirements, which translates to an increased cost of operation. In this research work, we propose a unified architecture for multi-time-scale predictions for intra-day solar irradiance forecasting using recurrent neural networks (RNN) and long-short-term memory networks (LSTMs). This paper also lays out a framework for extending this modeling approach to intra-hour forecasting horizons thus, making it a multi-time-horizon forecasting approach, capable of predicting intra-hour as well as intra-day solar irradiance. We develop an end-to-end pipeline to effectuate the proposed architecture. The performance of the prediction model is tested and validated by the methodical implementation. The robustness of the approach is demonstrated with case studies conducted for geographically scattered sites across the United States. The predictions demonstrate that our proposed unified architecture-based approach is effective for multi-time-scale solar forecasts and achieves a lower root-mean-square prediction error when benchmarked against the best-performing methods documented in the literature that use separate models for each time-scale during the day. Our proposed method results in a 71.5% reduction in the mean RMSE averaged across all the test sites compared to the ML-based best-performing method reported in the literature. Additionally, the proposed method enables multi-time-horizon forecasts with real-time inputs, which have a significant potential for practical industry applications in the evolving grid.Comment: 19 pages, 12 figures, 3 tables, under review for journal submissio

Wind energy forecasting with neural networks: a literature review

Renewable energy is intermittent by nature and to integrate this energy into the Grid while assuring safety and stability the accurate forecasting of there newable energy generation is critical. Wind Energy prediction is based on the ability to forecast wind. There are many methods for wind forecasting based on the statistical properties of the wind time series and in the integration of meteorological information, these methods are being used commercially around the world. But one family of new methods for wind power fore castingis surging based on Machine Learning Deep Learning techniques. This paper analyses the characteristics of the Wind Speed time series data and performs a literature review of recently published works of wind power forecasting using Machine Learning approaches (neural and deep learning networks), which have been published in the last few years.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version