A hybrid spatio-temporal prediction model for solar photovoltaic generation using numerical weather data and satellite images

Precise and accurate prediction of solar photovoltaic (PV) generation plays a major role in developing plans for the supply and demand of power grid systems. Most previous studies on the prediction of solar PV generation employed only weather data composed of numerical text data. The numerical text weather data can reflect temporal factors, however, they cannot consider the movement features related to the wind direction of the spatial characteristics, which include the amount of both clouds and particulate matter (PM) among other weather features. This study aims developing a hybrid spatio-temporal prediction model by combining general weather data and data extracted from satellite images having spatial characteristics. A model for hourly prediction of solar PV generation is proposed using data collected from a solar PV power plant in Incheon, South Korea. To evaluate the performance of the prediction model, we compared and performed ARIMAX analysis, which is a traditional statistical time-series analysis method, and SVR, ANN, and DNN, which are based on machine learning algorithms. The models that reflect the temporal and spatial characteristics exhibited better performance than those using only the general weather numerical data or the satellite image data.