A radiant shift: Attention-embedded CNNs for accurate solar irradiance forecasting and prediction from sky images

The continuous increase in solar power integration with energy systems can be attributed to the push for cleaner energy use globally, highlighting the importance of accurate solar forecasts. Conventional prediction methods, although valuable, often fall short of delivering the precision required for dynamic energy management systems due to their inability to effectively capture the intricate relationships inherent in solar irradiance variations. This research addresses this limitation by introducing a novel approach that harnesses the potential of Attention-embedded Convolutional Neural Networks (ATT_CNN) to forecast Global Horizontal Irradiance (GHI), Direct Normal Irradiance (DNI), and Diffuse Horizontal Irradiance (DHI) for intra-hour solar forecasting utilizing sequences of sky images. The main contribution of this study is the integration of attention mechanisms into the CNN architecture, strategically designed to enhance their efficacy in predicting GHI, DNI, and DHI by fostering an adaptive focus on sky image features. First, we use SRRL dataset with GHI, DNI, and DHI features as predicting labels, then the Mean Bias Error (MBE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and Forecasting RMSE skill score (FSS) are used to evaluate the model's performance. This study utilized six lead times and four sequence lengths, based on this the best combination is: Sequence length: 4 with Minutes: 20. This combination provides a balanced and optimal performance with low RMSE (62.75 W/m2), low MBE (2.71 W/m2), and a high FSS (38.81), indicating good accuracy, minimal bias, and high skill score. Furthermore, when compared with state-of-the-art models, the proposed model yielded superior results. This advancement holds profound implications for the optimization of solar power utilization within mainstream energy systems, further underscoring the significance of cutting-edge deep learning (DL) techniques in advancing sustainable energy technologies. The findings of this study indicate that integrating attention mechanisms is essential to enhance the accuracy and reliability of forecasts, and using longer sequences of images can further improve forecasting performance.