PVTimesNet: A Hybrid Deep Learning Method for Enhancing Ultra-Short-Term PV Power Forecasting

Accurate ultra-short-term photovoltaic (PV) power forecasting is crucial for the real-time scheduling of grid systems. However, the inherent variability of solar energy makes this task extremely challenging. To enhance PV power forecasting, this paper introduces a novel hybrid model named PVTimesNet, designed to harness the strengths of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory Network (LSTM) for effective feature extraction. PVTimesNet consists of two parallel branches: the CNN1d branch, which captures correlations between multiple variables and adjacent time steps, and the LSTM branch, which learns the temporal dependencies within the PV power sequences. The features extracted by both branches are then concatenated and passed through a fully connected layer to generate multi-step PV power forecasts. Experimental results demonstrate that for forecast horizons of 1 to 4 hours, the proposed model significantly outperforms individual models and other CNN-LSTM hybrid structures. Additionally, it exhibits superior performance compared to related methods for longer forecast horizons.