Hybrid RF-DNN-LSTM Ensemble for Short-Term Solar Energy Forecasting

Given the drastic shift of global sentiment towards renewable energy, it becomes incredibly important to match supply with demand. However the highly variable nature of weather makes it difficult to accurately predict the output of a solar power plant. In this paper, solved this problem by using an ensemble model consisting of both machine learning and neural networks (NN) as base models to forecast the amount of energy that needs to be produced by a solar plant over a short-term time horizon, which in our case will be 0 minute (immediate), 5 minute, 30 minute and 90 minute. Each base model is fine tuned to encourage high diversity and low correlation to improve prediction accuracy. The expected stability or generalization from RF-DNN combined with the memory retention capability of the LSTM network should provide an ideal predictor for time series forecasting of a stochastic process like weather.