A Hybrid Framework for Photovoltaic Power Forecasting Using Shifted Windows Transformer-Based Spatiotemporal Feature Extraction

Accurate photovoltaic (PV) power forecasting is essential to mitigating the security and stability challenges associated with PV integration into power grids. Ground-based sky images can quickly reveal cloud changes, and the spatiotemporal feature information extracted from these images can improve PV power forecasting. Therefore, this paper proposes a hybrid framework based on shifted windows Transformer (Swin Transformer), convolutional neural network, and long short-term memory network to comprehensively extract spatiotemporal feature information, including global spatial, local spatial, and temporal features, from ground-based sky images and PV power data. The mean absolute error and root mean squared error are reduced by 13.06% and 4.49% compared with ResNet-18. The experimental results indicate that the proposed framework demonstrates competitive predictive performance and generalization capability across different time horizons and weather conditions compared with benchmark frameworks.