SolarBoost: Distributed Photovoltaic Power Forecasting Amid Time-varying Grid Capacity
This addresses forecasting for DPV systems to improve grid operation, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing grid-level modeling with specific adaptations.
The paper tackles the problem of forecasting power output in distributed photovoltaic (DPV) systems, which face challenges like missing data and capacity shifts, by modeling aggregated output as a composite of small grids, and demonstrates its approach reduces potential losses through deployment in Chinese cities.
This paper presents SolarBoost, a novel approach for forecasting power output in distributed photovoltaic (DPV) systems. While existing centralized photovoltaic (CPV) methods are able to precisely model output dependencies due to uniformity, it is difficult to apply such techniques to DPV systems, as DPVs face challenges such as missing grid-level data, temporal shifts in installed capacity, geographic variability, and panel diversity. SolarBoost overcomes these challenges by modeling aggregated power output as a composite of output from small grids, where each grid output is modeled using a unit output function multiplied by its capacity. This approach decouples the homogeneous unit output function from dynamic capacity for accurate prediction. Efficient algorithms over an upper-bound approximation are proposed to overcome computational bottlenecks in loss functions. We demonstrate the superiority of grid-level modeling via theoretical analysis and experiments. SolarBoost has been validated through deployment across various cities in China, significantly reducing potential losses and provides valuable insights for the operation of power grids. The code for this work is available at https://github.com/DAMO-DI-ML/SolarBoost.