Prediction intervals estimation of solar generation based on gated recurrent unit and kernel density estimation

With the increasing attention to the energy crisis and global warming, solar generation has become an important way to use clean solar energy and is playing an increasingly important role. Due to the highly-variable patterns of solar generation, the estimation of prediction intervals is receiving more attention, which is conducive to the safe and stable operation of the power system. In order to further improve the performance of prediction intervals of solar generation, this paper proposes a prediction intervals estimation method for solar generation based on gated recurrent unit (GRU) neural networks and kernel density estimation (KDE). GRU, a commonly used recurrent neural networks, is utilized to obtain the deterministic forecast of solar generation. In addition, according to the characteristics of solar generation, attention mechanism is designed on the GRU prediction model to further improve the prediction performance. Then, the KDE method is used to fit the prediction errors of solar generation obtained by the deterministic forecasting method. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we have carried out a large number of experiments on freely available datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms competing methods and can generate high-quality prediction intervals.