An upscaling minute-level regional photovoltaic power forecasting scheme

Along with the increasing penetration of photovoltaic (PV) power generation, regional power forecasting becomes more and more critical for stable and economical operation of power system. The key challenge of regional PV power forecasting technology is the lack of complete and accurate historical power data since not all PV plants are equipped with the precise real-time output power monitoring system. Besides, the computation burden will be heavy when the number of PV plants in the target region is large. This paper therefore proposes an upscaling minute-level regional PV power forecasting scheme using the data of the selected reference PV plants. In this paper, a novel method of reference PV plants selection is proposed by comprehensively considering the prediction accuracy of artificial neural network (ANN) as well as Pearson correlation coefficient. The reference PV plant selection coefficient μ is introduced as the comprehensive indicator for reference PV plant selection, which incorporates Pearson correlation coefficient and MAPE. In addition, a PV output power correction method is assumed to guarantee the proper operation of regional power forecasting. Besides, this paper proposes a flexible approach to effectively decrease the accumulated error of rolling forecasting by integrating the forecasting results under different temporal resolutions. In specific, the power forecasting results in temporal resolutions of 1 min, 5 min and 15 min are simultaneously derived and the performance between the traditional rolling forecasting and the proposed method is compared. The validity of the proposed method is finally verified using the collected historical power data of PV plants installed in a city of Eastern China. For time resolution of 1 min, 5 mins and 10 mins, the corresponding RMSE are 6.56, 5.73 and 4.85 and corresponding MAPE are 4.04%, 3.45% and 2.86%.