Attention mechanism for developing wind speed and solar irradiance forecasting models

Abstract

This article presents the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and its Attention mechanism to develop forecasting models for renewable energy applications. In this study, wind speed and solar irradiance forecasting models have been developed as these two factors play a significant role in renewable energy production. The irregular nature of wind poses the challenge of accurate wind speed prediction, while solar irradiance forecasting can aid in the planning and deployment of solar power plants. In this paper, six RNN techniques, namely RNN, GRU, LSTM, Content-based Attention, Luong Attention, and Self-Attention based RNN are considered for forecasting the future values of wind speed and solar irradiance in particular geographical locations. The aim is the identification of the advantages, comparison, and importance of different recurrent neural network methods for forecasting models. All models are developed on the datasets of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and NASA’s Prediction of Worldwide Energy Resource (POWER).