2021 The 3rd Asia Energy and Electrical Engineering Symposium
Day-Ahead Photovoltaic Power Forcasting Using Convolutional-LSTM Networks
Yuanyuan Wang*
Dongying Power Supply Company
State Grid Shandong Electric Power Company,
Dongying, China
e-mail: fwork2020@163.com
Hanghang Liu,
Dongying Power Supply Company
State Grid Shandong Electric Power Company,
Dongying, China
e-mail: caic617618@163.com
2021 3rd Asia Energy and Electrical Engineering Symposium (AEEES) | 978-1-6654-2551-3/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/AEEES51875.2021.9403023
Xiaoxiang Su
Dongying Power Supply Company
State Grid Shandong Electric Power Company,
Dongying, China
e-mail: sxxiang@163.com
Abstract——Efficient and reliable forcasting of power
generation from PV plants is important for grid management
optimization and power dispatch allocation. In this paper, we
propose a hybrid model for short-term photovoltaic power
forcasting (PVPF), Convolutional-LSTM (Conv-LSTM), and
extend its attention mechanism architecture and shortcut
connection architecture, called Conv-LSTM-A and
Conv-LSTM-S, respectively.The input data used are hourly
data of commercial PV plants for one year and contain only
four features: historical active power, solar radiation, panel
temperature and current hour. The effects of different
historical data lengths on the forcasting results are compared.
The hyperparameters of the model were adjusted using
bayesian optimization to find the model with the best
hyperparameter configuration. The experimental results show
that the RMSE of the Conv-LSTM-A model is 11.13% and the
MAPE of the Conv-LSTM-S model is 7.0030 using 7 days of
historical data for day-ahead PV power forcasting.
Keywords-tovoltaic power; convolutional-LSTM; attention
mechanism; shortcut connection; bayesian optimization
I. INTRODUCTION
In response to the depletion of fossil fuels and global
warming, renewable energy (RE) is becoming an
increasingly important part of the energy mix. Among them,
photovoltaic power generation is one of the most promising
technologies for renewable energy generation [1]. The
Global Future Report 2013 Renewable Energy Policy
Network for the 21st Century (REN21) predicts that by 2050,
the global solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity has the potential
to reach 8000 GW [2]. However, the intermittent and
fluctuating solar radiation results in high variability in power
generation, which poses a serious challenge for PV power to
the grid. Efficient and accurate forecasting can solve these
problems [3].
978-1-6654-2551-3/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE
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Yaobang Chen
School of Physical Science and Technology
University of Jinan
Jinan, China
e-mail: datacyb@gmail.com
Xiaowei Ma
Dongying Power Supply Company
State Grid Shandong Electric Power Company,
Dongying, China
e-mail: cai617618@163.com
Qi Liu
Dongying Power Supply Company
State Grid Shandong Electric Power Company,
Dongying, China
e-mail: rose@163.com
PV power forecasting (PVPF) can be classified into
short-term forecasting and long-term forecasting according
to the forecast duration. Forecasting methods are divided into
four main categories: statistical models, machine learning
models, hybrid models, and deep learning models. Statistical
models mainly rely on the historical data of the predicted
variables for forecasting, such as probabilistic models [4] and
autoregressive (AR) models [5]. Machine learning models
are mostly used for recursive forcasting, mainly support
vector machines (SVM) [6] and regression models [7].
hybrid models are mainly a mixture of the above models
[8,9]. deep learning models can achieve multi-step direct
forcasting and can cope well with overfitting and gradient
disappearance problems. CNN [10], RNN [11] and hybrid
models have been shown to be be applied to PV power
generation forcasting. Among them, the hybrid model of
CNN and RNN is one of the most commonly used methods
[12].
In a hybrid model based on deep learning, [13] used a
CNN-LSTM model to predict solar radiation and their results
showed good short-term forcasting results. [14] used
LSTM-RNN model for day-ahead PVPF, which improved
the generalization ability of the model. [15] demonstrated
that the hybrid LSTM-Convolutional model can be applied
to PVPF. [16] used the attention mechanism model for
short-term PVPF and demonstrated the effectiveness of the
LSTM-Attention model. In [17], the Convolutional LSTM
Network was proposed for the first time and used for
precipitation forecasting, which can extract spatio-temporal
features. In view of the advantages of hybrid models, this
paper proposes a new hybrid forcasting model for PVPF,
Convolutional-LSTM (Conv-LSTM) and extends the
attention mechanism and shortcut connection models, called
Conv-LSTM-A and Conv-LSTM -S.
The main contributions of this paper are as follows: 1) A
hybrid PVPF network with better extraction of
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spatio-temporal features is proposed, using 2D-CNN to
extract spatial features and combining attention mechanism
and shortcut connection to redesign two models to improve
the forcasting capability of the model. 2) Using bayesian
optimization to fine-tune hyperparameters, the optimal
configuration of the model is found efficiently and with good
generalization ability. 3) The model performance is
compared when using 5-day and 7-day historical data for
forcasting respectively. The main structure of this paper is as
follows: Section 2 introduces the proposed model
architectures. Section 3 introduces the dataset used in this
paper. Section 4 presents the evaluation metrics and
experimental results; Section 5 gives the conclusions.
II. METHODOLOGY
A. Conv-LSTM
In order to solve the gradient disappearance or gradient
explosion problem of RNN and achieve long distance
learning, [18] proposed Long Short Term Memory Network
(LSTM), which adds hidden states with a nonlinear
mechanism called cell state.LSTM uses simple The LSTM
uses a simple gating function to control the modification,
update or reset of the state, including input gate, output gate
and forget gate. The update equation is shown in (1):
where denotes the sigmoid activation function,
Then is integrated (intergrated) with the previous
hidden state unit and the previous target output
to predict the current hidden state .
The proposed Conv-LSTM-A model architecture in this
paper is shown in Figure 1(b).
C. Conv-LSTM with Shortcut
The concept of shortcut connection or residual
connection comes from ResNet [21], which effectively
alleviates the gradient disappearance problem and lays the
foundation for building deep networks. Networks with
shortcut connection are easier to optimize and have better
performance than normal networks.
Inspired by this, this paper adds a layer with a single
LSTM as shortcut connection to the Conv-LSTM model, and
then concatenate the features learned from the two paths.
The Conv-LSTM-S model architecture as shown in Figure
1(c).
D. Error Metrics
To evaluate the model performance from multiple
perspectives, this paper uses RMSE and MAPE as evaluation
metrics. The RMSE is used as the loss function to train and
optimize the model. Its equation is shown in Equation (3):

denotes the gate weight, denotes the bias,

denotes the input vector, denotes the hidden state,
denotes the cell state vector, denotes the
forgotten gate vector, denotes the input gate vector,
where and denote the predicted power and
denotes the output gate vector, and denotes
the Hadamard product. actual power, respectively. is the number of samples.
CNN models have various architectures, and this paper is E. Day-Ahead Forcasting
designed based on the classical VGG model [19]. The
There are two types of forecasting methods in the PVPF
proposed Conv-LSTM model architecture in this paper is
task: direct forecasting and recursive forecasting. Among
shown in Figure 1(a).
them, direct forecasting can be further divided into
B. Conv-LSTM with Attention single-step forecasting and multi-step forecasting. In this
The attention mechanism model comes from the field of paper, we use multi-step forcasting, i.e., we use the previous
natural language processing, which enables better translation feature series data to predict the power for the following day,
of long sentences [20]. In the attention mechanism model, as shown in Figure 2.

the context vector ( ) is a weighted sum of the hidden

states , which represents the
information contained in the current time step. As shown in
Equation (2):

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Figure 1. Model Architecture: (a) Conv-LSTM, (b) Conv-LSTM-A, (c)
Conv-LSTM-S
Figure 2. Multi-step direct forcasting illustration
III. DATA CONSTRUCTION
Original data process.The raw data used in this paper
come from one year of data from commercial PV plants,
which contain a large number of outliers. In the experiments
of this paper, a simple outlier process is used, i.e., data with
negative values in power and solar radiation are set to zero.
Resample data.The time interval of the raw data used in
this paper is 15 minutes, and because the power varies less
within an hour, the raw data are resampled into data with a
time interval of one hour according to the hourly average.
The final data of 8737 records were obtained, and the box
plots of power and solar radiation in the data of each month
are shown in Figure 3. The power and solar radiation
obtained by resampling at the daily average are shown in
Figure 4.
Train and test data split.In this paper, the original data
are divided into training set, validation set and test set with
the proportions of 70%, 20% and 10%, respectively. Then the
data are normalized use z-score method and the final data are
in the range of [0,1].
Feature selection.Considering the generalization
capability and forcasting robustness of the model, this paper
follows the general approach of selecting historical power,
solar irradiance, panel temperature, and current hour as the
set of input features for the model from the 11 features of the
original data.
Sample data process.In the time series forcasting task,
the raw data needs to be processed into sample data before
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feeding the data into a deep learning model. The processing
is usually done using a sliding window, and the final sample
data set has a shape of [samples, history length, features].
Section 4 of this paper compares the effect of using 5-day
historical series data and 7-day historical series data on the
model performance. Therefore the data SHAPE used in the
two experiments are [None,24 × ,4] and [None, 24 × 7, 4]
respectively.
Figure 3. Box diagram of Solar Radiation and Active Power feature
Figure 4. Solar Radiation and Active Power feature Plot using daily data
resampled
IV. EXPERIMENTS
A. Data Preprocessing
The model input designed in this paper requires 4D input,
so the shape of the sample dataset needs to be reshaped. In
this paper, we use to slice (split) the historical time series
into 4 sub-series to realize the adjustment of 3D sample
dataset into 4D sample dataset.
B. Hyperparameter Fine-Tuning
In this paper, we use bayesian optimization [22] to
fine-tune hyperparameters of the model. Compared with grid
search and random search, bayesian optimization can find
the optimal parameter configuration efficiently and quickly.
Taking the LSTM model as an example, the hyperparameter
space and the optimal configuration to be searched are
shown in Table I. From this, we can see that the learning rate
is 0.0004, the optimizer is nadam, the batch size is 224, the
number of LSTM layers is 2, the activation function is tanh,
and the number of neurons are 32.
In this paper, all models are trained with early stopping
set, and training is stopped when the loss on the validation
set no longer changes in 30 iterations, and the maximum
number of training is set to 150. before forcasting, the models
are retrained.Finally, the forcasting results are
inverse-normalized.
 TABLE I. PARAMETERS CONFIGURATION OF LSTM AFTER As can be seen, using 5-day historical data for training,
FINE-TUNING
the RMSE of each model ranges from 12.00% to 12.85% and
Hyperparameters Choice Choose the MAPE ranges from 7.6585 to 7.9240, with Conv-LSTM-S
Learning rate [1e-4, 1e-1] 0.0004 obtaining the best performance. Using 7 days of historical
data for training, the RMSE of each model ranged from
Optimizer [Adagrad,Adam,Aadam] Nadam
11.13% to 12.83% and the MAPE ranged from 7.0030 to
Batch size [32, 224] 224
7.8645, with Conv-LSMT-S obtaining the best RMSE and
Activation [sigmoid, tanh] tanh Conv-LSTM-A obtaining the best MAPE.
Layers [1,3] 2 After increasing the length of the historical data, the
Units [16,128] 32,32 Conv-LSTM-A model obtained the largest performance
Epochs Early Stopping -- improvement with 9.12% improvement in RMSE and 9.39%
improvement in MAPE. the Conv-LSTM-S model also
TABLE II. EVALUATION METAICS FOR EACH MODEL obtained a larger improvement with 7.25% improvement in
RMSE and 5.66% improvement in MAPE. From Figure 3
Models RMSE MAPE
and Figure 4, it can be seen that the range of power
LSTM 0.1259/0.1122 7.9240/7.7617 generation for the data used in this paper is from 0 to 20 MW,
Conv-LSTM 0.1285/0.1283 7.8996/7.8645 and there are some extreme values and outliers. the MAPE
Conv-LSTM-A 0.1294/0.1176 7.7284/7.0030 of the Conv-LSTM-A and Conv-LSTM-S models is smaller,
Conv-LSTM-S 0.1200/0.1113 7.6585/7.2253 which indicates their better robustness to fluctuations in peak
power.
One-day ahead PV power forcasting was performed C. Day-Ahead Forcasting
using 5-day and 7-day historical series data, respectively, and
This section compares the effects of different historical
the model was retrained using the best hyperparameter
series lengths on model forcasting performance.
configuration for each model, and each metric after the
training was completed is shown in Table 2.

Figure 5. Forecast results using 5-day historical data

Figure 6. Forecast results using 7-day historical data

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 In Fig 5, it can be seen that the solar radiation is highly
correlated with the power. The model is prone to high errors
when predicting periods of excessive power fluctuations in a
short period of time. When predicting nighttime power, the
model predicts negative values, and there are two reasons for
this result. First, the nighttime power was negative in the
actual collected data, but it was processed to a zero value
during preprocessing, thus changing the trend of the data.
Second, the activation function is tanh resulting in a range of
[-1,1] for the output values and a large difference between
the maximum and minimum values of power, resulting in a
large volatility of the data.
In Fig 6, it can be seen that the model predicts the peak
power more accurately when the side length of the historical
data series used.And, the LSTM model shows greater
fluctuations in predicting the nighttime power, which leads
to larger errors. Where the Conv-LSTM and Conv-LSTM-S
models are biased towards more conservative forcasting and
thus obtain higher errors, and the Conv-LSTM-S is biased
towards more aggressive forcasting, all three proposed
models outperform the LSTM model.
V. CONCLUSIONS
In this study, we explored four models using two
different granularities of data for day-ahead PV generation
forecasting: 1) LSTM, 2) Conv-LSTM , 3) Conv-LSTM-A,
and 4) Conv-LSTM-S. Using only four features, the
proposed models all obtained encouraging results. The
Conv-LSTM-A model achieves a maximum improvement of
9.12% in RMSE and 9.39% in MAPE when increasing the
historical data from 5 to 7 days. The experimental results
show that the CNN and LSTM models can model the PV
power prediction problem and achieve comparable
performance. In a one-day ahead PV power prediction task
using only one year of hourly data, at least 5 days of data are
required to achieve better results.
The best configuration of the model can be searched for
faster using bayesian optimization. All three proposed
models outperform the LSTM model, the Conv-LSTM-A
model combined with the attention mechanism makes better
use of historical information, and the Conv-LSTM-S model
combined with the shortcut connection extracts richer
features and is easier to train. Both models improve the
information flow, and therefore the forcasting results are
better. The proposed model has good adaptability to the
maximum and minimum values of PVPF.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This work was supported by National Key R&D Program
of China (Intergovernmental Special Projects,
2019YFE0118400) and A project of Shandong Province
Higher Educational Youth Innovation Science and
Technology Program (2019KJN029).
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