Sky images based photovoltaic power forecasting: A novel approach with optimized VMD and Vision Mamba

As the global demand for sustainable energy sources continues to grow, accurate prediction of photovoltaic power generation is crucial for optimizing the utilization of solar resources and enhancing the efficiency of photovoltaic systems. To improve the accuracy of photovoltaic power forecasting, this paper proposes a novel hybrid predictive model that integrates Optimized Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD), Vision Mamba (Vim) for extracting features from sky images, and advanced mechanisms like Patch Embedding and Variate-wise Cross-Attention. Initially, the proposed model employs SAO-optimized VMD to decompose the photovoltaic power series into high, medium, and low-frequency components. Subsequently, these components are patched to serve as input for the subsequent layers. In the third step, exogenous variables, including meteorological and image data, are introduced and processed through Variate Embedding combined with cross-attention mechanisms to capture the intricate interactions between these variables. Finally, by integrating the outputs from all processing steps through normalization and feed-forward layers, the final predictive results are produced. Experimental evaluations across different seasons demonstrate significant enhancements in forecasting accuracy, with the model achieving Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) values of 0.3587 in spring, 0.4376 in summer, 0.3544 in autumn, and 0.3493 in winter. Similarly, Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Mean Squared Error (MSE) across these seasons underscore the model's effectiveness. This model offers new technical means for photovoltaic power forecasting and provides valuable decision support for the optimization and management of photovoltaic power systems. • Hybrid model using optimized VMD, Vision Mamba and TimeXer for enhanced photovoltaic power forecasting. • Vision Mamba innovatively applied to extract sky features for photovoltaic power forecasting. • Novel use of Snow Ablation Optimization to refine VMD, boosting model performance. • Integrative approach leverages multiscale data for accuracy. • Surpasses many novel and classical models in comparative studies.