23,254 research outputs found
Solar Power Plant Detection on Multi-Spectral Satellite Imagery using Weakly-Supervised CNN with Feedback Features and m-PCNN Fusion
Most of the traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) implements
bottom-up approach (feed-forward) for image classifications. However, many
scientific studies demonstrate that visual perception in primates rely on both
bottom-up and top-down connections. Therefore, in this work, we propose a CNN
network with feedback structure for Solar power plant detection on
middle-resolution satellite images. To express the strength of the top-down
connections, we introduce feedback CNN network (FB-Net) to a baseline CNN model
used for solar power plant classification on multi-spectral satellite data.
Moreover, we introduce a method to improve class activation mapping (CAM) to
our FB-Net, which takes advantage of multi-channel pulse coupled neural network
(m-PCNN) for weakly-supervised localization of the solar power plants from the
features of proposed FB-Net. For the proposed FB-Net CAM with m-PCNN,
experimental results demonstrated promising results on both solar-power plant
image classification and detection task.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures, 4 table
Failure mode prediction and energy forecasting of PV plants to assist dynamic maintenance tasks by ANN based models
In the field of renewable energy, reliability analysis techniques combining the operating time of the system with the observation of operational and environmental conditions, are gaining importance over time.
In this paper, reliability models are adapted to incorporate monitoring data on operating assets, as well as information on their environmental conditions, in their calculations. To that end, a logical decision tool based on two artificial neural networks models is presented. This tool allows updating assets reliability analysis according to changes in operational and/or environmental conditions.
The proposed tool could easily be automated within a supervisory control and data acquisition system, where reference values and corresponding warnings and alarms could be now dynamically generated using the tool. Thanks to this capability, on-line diagnosis and/or potential asset degradation prediction can be certainly improved.
Reliability models in the tool presented are developed according to the available amount of failure data and are used for early detection of degradation in energy production due to power inverter and solar trackers functional failures.
Another capability of the tool presented in the paper is to assess the economic risk associated with the system under existing conditions and for a certain period of time. This information can then also be used to trigger preventive maintenance activities
Grey-Box Modeling for Photo-Voltaic Power Systems Using Dynamic Neural-Networks
There exists various ways of modeling and forecasting photo-voltaic (PV) systems. These methods can be categorized, in board-way, under either definite equations models (white or clear-box) or heuristic data-driven artificial intelligence models (black-box). The two directions of modeling pose a number of drawbacks. To benefit from both worlds, this paper proposes a novel method where clear-box model is extended to a grey-box model by modeling uncertainities using focused time-delay neural network models. The grey-box or semi-definite model was shown to exhibit enhanced forecasting capabilities
Prediction in Photovoltaic Power by Neural Networks
The ability to forecast the power produced by renewable energy plants in the short and middle term is a key issue to allow a high-level penetration of the distributed generation into the grid infrastructure. Forecasting energy production is mandatory for dispatching and distribution issues, at the transmission system operator level, as well as the electrical distributor and power system operator levels. In this paper, we present three techniques based on neural and fuzzy neural networks, namely the radial basis function, the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system and the higher-order neuro-fuzzy inference system, which are well suited to predict data sequences stemming from real-world applications. The preliminary results concerning the prediction of the power generated by a large-scale photovoltaic plant in Italy confirm the reliability and accuracy of the proposed approaches
Review and Comparison of Intelligent Optimization Modelling Techniques for Energy Forecasting and Condition-Based Maintenance in PV Plants
Within the field of soft computing, intelligent optimization modelling techniques include
various major techniques in artificial intelligence. These techniques pretend to generate new business
knowledge transforming sets of "raw data" into business value. One of the principal applications of
these techniques is related to the design of predictive analytics for the improvement of advanced
CBM (condition-based maintenance) strategies and energy production forecasting. These advanced
techniques can be used to transform control system data, operational data and maintenance event data
to failure diagnostic and prognostic knowledge and, ultimately, to derive expected energy generation.
One of the systems where these techniques can be applied with massive potential impact are the
legacy monitoring systems existing in solar PV energy generation plants. These systems produce a
great amount of data over time, while at the same time they demand an important e ort in order to
increase their performance through the use of more accurate predictive analytics to reduce production
losses having a direct impact on ROI. How to choose the most suitable techniques to apply is one of
the problems to address. This paper presents a review and a comparative analysis of six intelligent
optimization modelling techniques, which have been applied on a PV plant case study, using the
energy production forecast as the decision variable. The methodology proposed not only pretends
to elicit the most accurate solution but also validates the results, in comparison with the di erent
outputs for the di erent techniques
Collinsville solar thermal project: yield forecasting (draft report)
The final report has been published and is available here.
Executive Summary
1 Introduction
This report’s primary aim is to provide yield projections for the proposed Linear Fresnel Reflector (LFR) technology plant at Collinsville, Queensland, Australia. However, the techniques developed in this report to overcome inadequate datasets at Collinsville to produce the yield projections are of interest to a wider audience because inadequate datasets for renewable energy projects are commonplace. The subsequent report called ‘Energy economics and dispatch forecasting’ (Bell, Wild & Foster 2014a) uses the yield projections from this report to produce long-term wholesale market price and dispatch forecasts for the plant.
2 Literature review
The literature review discusses the four drivers for yield for LFR technology:
DNI (Direct Normal Irradiance)
Temperature
Humidity
Pressure
Collinsville lacks complete historical datasets of the four drivers to develop yield projects but its three nearby neighbours do possess complete datasets, so could act as proxies for Collinsville. However, analysing the four drivers for Collinsville and its three nearby sites shows that there is considerable difference in their climates. This difference makes them unsuitable to act as proxies for yield calculations. Therefore, the review investigates modelling the four drivers for Collinsville.
We introduce the term “effective” DNI to help clarify and ameliorate concerns over the dust and dew effects on terrestrial DNI measurement and LFR technology.
We also introduce a modified TMY technique to overcome technology specific Typical Metrological Year (TMY). We discuss the effect of climate change and the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on yield and their implications for a TMY.
2.1 Research questions
Research question arising from the literature review include:
The overarching research question:
Can modelling the weather with limited datasets produce greater yield predictive power than using the historically more complete datasets from nearby sites?
This overarching question has a number of smaller supporting research questions:
Is BoM’s DNI satellite dataset adequately adjusted for cloud cover at Collinsville?
Given the dust and dew effects, is using raw satellite data sufficient to model yield?
Does elevation between Collinsville and nearby sites affect yield?
How does the ENSO affect yield?
Given the 2007-2012 constraint, will the TMY process provide a “Typical” year over the ENSO cycle?
How does climate change affect yield?
A further research question arises in the methodology but is included here for completeness.
What is the expected frequency of oversupply from the Linear Fresnel Novatec Solar Boiler?
3 Methodology
In the methodology section, we discuss the data preparation and the model selection process for the four drivers of yield.
4 Results and analysis
In the results section we present the four driver models selected and the process that was undertaken to arrive at the models.
5 Discussion
We analyse the extent to which the research questions are informed by the results.
6 Conclusion
In this report, we have identified the key research questions and established a methodology to address these questions. The models for the four drivers have been established allowing the calculation of the yield projections for Collinsville
DeepSolarEye: Power Loss Prediction and Weakly Supervised Soiling Localization via Fully Convolutional Networks for Solar Panels
The impact of soiling on solar panels is an important and well-studied
problem in renewable energy sector. In this paper, we present the first
convolutional neural network (CNN) based approach for solar panel soiling and
defect analysis. Our approach takes an RGB image of solar panel and
environmental factors as inputs to predict power loss, soiling localization,
and soiling type. In computer vision, localization is a complex task which
typically requires manually labeled training data such as bounding boxes or
segmentation masks. Our proposed approach consists of specialized four stages
which completely avoids localization ground truth and only needs panel images
with power loss labels for training. The region of impact area obtained from
the predicted localization masks are classified into soiling types using the
webly supervised learning. For improving localization capabilities of CNNs, we
introduce a novel bi-directional input-aware fusion (BiDIAF) block that
reinforces the input at different levels of CNN to learn input-specific feature
maps. Our empirical study shows that BiDIAF improves the power loss prediction
accuracy by about 3% and localization accuracy by about 4%. Our end-to-end
model yields further improvement of about 24% on localization when learned in a
weakly supervised manner. Our approach is generalizable and showed promising
results on web crawled solar panel images. Our system has a frame rate of 22
fps (including all steps) on a NVIDIA TitanX GPU. Additionally, we collected
first of it's kind dataset for solar panel image analysis consisting 45,000+
images.Comment: Accepted for publication at WACV 201
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
Multi-time-horizon Solar Forecasting Using Recurrent Neural Network
The non-stationarity characteristic of the solar power renders traditional
point forecasting methods to be less useful due to large prediction errors.
This results in increased uncertainties in the grid operation, thereby
negatively affecting the reliability and increased cost of operation. This
research paper proposes a unified architecture for multi-time-horizon
predictions for short and long-term solar forecasting using Recurrent Neural
Networks (RNN). The paper describes an end-to-end pipeline to implement the
architecture along with the methods to test and validate the performance of the
prediction model. The results demonstrate that the proposed method based on the
unified architecture is effective for multi-horizon solar forecasting and
achieves a lower root-mean-squared prediction error compared to the previous
best-performing methods which use one model for each time-horizon. The proposed
method enables multi-horizon forecasts with real-time inputs, which have a high
potential for practical applications in the evolving smart grid.Comment: Accepted at: IEEE Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition (ECCE
2018), 7 pages, 5 figures, code available: sakshi-mishra.github.i
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