Prospective Methodologies in Hybrid Renewable Energy Systems for Energy Prediction Using Artificial Neural Networks

Solar photovoltaic panel production in Mexico: A novel machine learning approach

This study examines the potential for widespread solar photovoltaic panel production in Mexico and emphasizes the country's unique qualities that position it as a strong manufacturing candidate in this field. An advanced model based on artificial neural networks has been developed to predict solar photovoltaic panel plant metrics. This model integrates a state-of-the-art non-linear programming framework using Pyomo as well as an innovative optimization and machine learning toolkit library. This approach creates surrogate models for individual photovoltaic plants including production timelines. While this research, conducted through extensive simulations and meticulous computations, unveiled that Latin America has been significantly underrepresented in the production of silicon, wafers, cells, and modules within the global market; it also demonstrates the substantial potential of scaling up photovoltaic panel production in Mexico, leading to significant economic, social, and environmental benefits. By hyperparameter optimization, an outstanding and competitive artificial neural network model has been developed with a coefficient of determination values above 0.99 for all output variables. It has been found that water and energy consumption during PV panel production is remarkable. However, water consumption (33.16 × 10-4 m3/kWh) and the emissions generated (1.12 × 10-6 TonCO2/kWh) during energy production are significantly lower than those of conventional power plants. Notably, the results highlight a positive economic trend, with module production plants generating the highest profits (35.7%) among all production stages, while polycrystalline silicon production plants yield comparatively lower earnings (13.0%). Furthermore, this study underscores a critical factor in the photovoltaic panel production process which is that cell production plants contribute the most to energy consumption (39.7%) due to their intricate multi-stage processes. The blending of Machine Learning and optimization models heralds a new era in resource allocation for a more sustainable renewable energy sector, offering a brighter, greener future.

A short- and medium-term forecasting model for roof PV systems with data pre-processing

This study worked with Chunghwa Telecom to collect data from 17 rooftop solar photovoltaic plants installed on top of office buildings, warehouses, and computer rooms in northern, central and southern Taiwan from January 2021 to June 2023. A data pre-processing method combining linear regression and K Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) was proposed to estimate missing values for weather and power generation data. Outliers were processed using historical data and parameters highly correlated with power generation volumes were used to train an artificial intelligence (AI) model. To verify the reliability of this data pre-processing method, this study developed multilayer perceptron (MLP) and long short-term memory (LSTM) models to make short-term and medium-term power generation forecasts for the 17 solar photovoltaic plants. Study results showed that the proposed data pre-processing method reduced normalized root mean square error (nRMSE) for short- and medium-term forecasts in the MLP model by 17.47% and 11.06%, respectively, and also reduced the nRMSE for short- and medium-term forecasts in the LSTM model by 20.20% and 8.03%, respectively.

Renewable energy sources integration via machine learning modelling: A systematic literature review

The use of renewable energy sources (RESs) at the distribution level has become increasingly appealing in terms of costs and technology, expecting a massive diffusion in the near future and placing several challenges to the power grid. Since RESs depend on stochastic energy sources -solar radiation, temperature and wind speed, among others- they introduce a high level of uncertainty to the grid, leading to power imbalance and deteriorating the network stability. In this scenario, managing and forecasting RES uncertainty is vital to successfully integrate them into the power grids. Traditionally, physical- and statistical-based models have been used to predict RES power outputs. Nevertheless, the former are computationally expensive since they rely on solving complex mathematical models of the atmospheric dynamics, whereas the latter usually consider linear models, preventing them from addressing challenging forecasting scenarios. In recent years, the advances in machine learning techniques, which can learn from historical data, allowing the analysis of large-scale datasets either under non-uniform characteristics or noisy data, have provided researchers with powerful data-driven tools that can outperform traditional methods. In this paper, a systematic literature review is conducted to identify the most widely used machine learning-based approaches to forecast RES power outputs. The results show that deep artificial neural networks, especially long-short term memory networks, which can accurately model the autoregressive nature of RES power output, and ensemble strategies, which allow successfully handling large amounts of highly fluctuating data, are the best suited ones. In addition, the most promising results of integrating the forecasted output into decision-making problems, such as unit commitment, to address economic, operational and managerial grid challenges are discussed, and solid directions for future research are provided.

Forecasting of non-renewable and renewable energy production in India using optimized discrete grey model

Renewable energy delivers reliable power supplies and fuel diversification, enhancing energy security and lowering fuel spill risk. Renewable energy also helps conserve the nation's natural resources. Solar and other renewable energy sources have become increasingly prominent in recent years. India has achieved the 20 GW capacity solar energy production target before 2022. It is presently producing the lowest-cost solar power at the global level. Thermal energy has dominated the energy market. Countries have decided on energy generation from renewable sources and adopting green energy. This study forecasted non-renewable and renewable energy from multiple sources (hydropower, solar, wind and bioenergy) using grey forecasting model DGM (1,1,α). The comparative analyses with the classical models DGM (1,1) and EGM (1,1) revealed the superiority of the DGM (1,1,α). We also used CAGR for 2009-2019 to compare the actual and predicted data growth rate. The results show that non-renewable and renewable energy production is expected to increase. However, renewable energy generation wind sources continue to increase faster than hydropower, solar and bioenergy.

Home Energy Forecast Performance Tool for Smart Living Services Suppliers under an Energy 4.0 and CPS Framework

Industry 4.0 is a paradigm consisting of cyber-physical systems based on the interconnection between all sorts of machines, sensors, and actuators, generally known as things. The combination of energy technology and information and technology communication (ICT) enables measurement, control, and automation to be performed across the distributed grid with high time resolution. Through digital revolution in the energy sector, the term Energy 4.0 emerges in the future electric sector. The growth outlook for appliance usage is increasing and the appearance of renewable energy sources on the electric grid requires strategies to control demand and peak loads. Potential feedback for energy performance is the use of smart meters in conjunction with smart energy management; well-designed applications will successfully inform, engage, empower, and motivate consumers. This paper presents several hands-on tools for load forecasting, comparing previous works and verifying which show the best energy forecasting performance in a smart monitoring system. Simulations were performed based on forecasting of the hours ahead of the load for several households. Special attention was given to the accuracy of the forecasting model for weekdays and weekends. The development of the proposed methods, based on artificial neural networks (ANN), provides more reliable forecasting for a few hours ahead and peak loads.

Hybrid Forecasting Methodology for Wind Power-Photovoltaic-Concentrating Solar Power Generation Clustered Renewable Energy Systems

Forecasting of large-scale renewable energy clusters composed of wind power generation, photovoltaic and concentrating solar power (CSP) generation encounters complex uncertainties due to spatial scale dispersion and time scale random fluctuation. In response to this, a short-term forecasting method is proposed to improve the hybrid forecasting accuracy of multiple generation types in the same region. It is formed through training the long short-term memory (LSTM) network using spatial panel data. Historical power data and meteorological data for CSP plant, wind farm and photovoltaic (PV) plant are included in the dataset. Based on the data set, the correlation between these three types of power generation is proved by Pearson coefficient, and the feasibility of improving the forecasting ability through the hybrid renewable energy clusters is analyzed. Moreover, cases study indicates that the uncertainty of renewable energy cluster power tends to weaken due to partial controllability of CSP generation. Compared with the traditional prediction method, the hybrid prediction method has better prediction accuracy in the real case of renewable energy cluster in Northwest China.

Bootstrapped Ensemble of Artificial Neural Networks Technique for Quantifying Uncertainty in Prediction of Wind Energy Production

The accurate prediction of wind energy production is crucial for an affordable and reliable power supply to consumers. Prediction models are used as decision-aid tools for electric grid operators to dynamically balance the energy production provided by a pool of diverse sources in the energy mix. However, different sources of uncertainty affect the predictions, providing the decision-makers with non-accurate and possibly misleading information for grid operation. In this regard, this work aims to quantify the possible sources of uncertainty that affect the predictions of wind energy production provided by an ensemble of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models. The proposed Bootstrap (BS) technique for uncertainty quantification relies on estimating Prediction Intervals (PIs) for a predefined confidence level. The capability of the proposed BS technique is verified, considering a 34 MW wind plant located in Italy. The obtained results show that the BS technique provides a more satisfactory quantification of the uncertainty of wind energy predictions than that of a technique adopted by the wind plant owner and the Mean-Variance Estimation (MVE) technique of literature. The PIs obtained by the BS technique are also analyzed in terms of different weather conditions experienced by the wind plant and time horizons of prediction.