Neural Network-Based Solar Irradiance Forecast for Edge Computing Devices

Aiming at effectively improving photovoltaic (PV) park operation and the stability of the electricity grid, the current paper addresses the design and development of a novel system achieving the short-term irradiance forecasting for the PV park area, which is the key factor for controlling the variations in the PV power production. First, it introduces the Xception long short-term memory (XceptionLSTM) cell tailored for recurrent neural networks (RNN). Second, it presents the novel irradiance forecasting model that consists of a sequence-to-sequence image regression NNs in the form of a spatio-temporal encoder–decoder including Xception layers in the spatial encoder, the novel XceptionLSTM in the temporal encoder and decoder and a multilayer perceptron in the spatial decoder. The proposed model achieves a forecast skill of 16.57% for a horizon of 5 min when compared to the persistence model. Moreover, the proposed model is designed for execution on edge computing devices and the real-time application of the inference on the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 8 GB and the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W validates the results.