Dual-Encoder Transformer for Short-Term Photovoltaic Power Prediction Using Satellite Remote-Sensing Data

Abstract

The penetration of photovoltaic (PV) energy has gained a significant increase in recent years because of its sustainable and clean characteristics. However, the uncertainty of PV power affected by variable weather poses challenges to an accurate short-term prediction, which is crucial for reliable power system operation. Existing methods focus on coupling satellite images with ground measurements to extract features using deep neural networks. However, a flexible predictive framework capable of handling these two data structures is still not well developed. The spatial and temporal features are merely concatenated and passed to the following layer of a neural network, which is incapable of utilizing the correlation between them. Therefore, we propose a novel dual-encoder transformer (DualET) for short-term PV power prediction. The dual encoders contain wavelet transform and series decomposition blocks to extract informative features from image and sequence data, respectively. Moreover, we propose a cross-domain attention module to learn the correlation between the temporal features and cloud information and modify the attention modules with the spare form and Fourier transform to improve their performance. The experiments on real-world datasets, including PV station data and satellite images, show that our model achieves better results than other models for short-term PV power prediction.