Image feature learning combined with attention‐based spectral representation for spatio‐temporal photovoltaic power prediction

Abstract Clean energy is a major trend. The importance of photovoltaic power generation is also growing. Photovoltaic power generation is mainly affected by the weather. It is full of uncertainties. Previous work has relied chiefly on historical photovoltaics data for time series forecasts. However, unforeseen weather conditions can sometimes skew. Consequently, a spatial‐temporal‐meteorological‐long short‐term memory prediction model (STM‐LSTM) is proposed to compensate for the shortage of photovoltaic prediction models for uncertainties. This model can simultaneously process satellite image data, historical meteorological data, and historical power generation data. In this way, historical patterns and meteorological change information are extracted to improve the accuracy of photovoltaic prediction. STM‐LSTM processes raw satellite data to obtain cloud image data. It can extract cloud motion information using the dense optical flow method. First, the cloud images are processed to extract cloud position information. By adaptive attentive learning of images in different bands, a better representation for subsequent tasks can be obtained. Second, it is important to process historical meteorological data to learn meteorological change patterns. Last but not least, the historical photovoltaic power generation sequences are combined to obtain the final photovoltaic prediction results. After a series of experimental validation, the performance of the proposed STM‐LSTM model has a good improvement compared with the baseline model.