Predictive Modeling of PV Energy Production: How to Set Up the Learning Task for a Better Prediction?

In this paper, we tackle the problem of power prediction of several photovoltaic (PV) plants spread over an extended geographic area and connected to a power grid. The paper is intended to be a comprehensive study of one-day ahead forecast of PV energy production along several dimensions of analysis: 1) The consideration of the spatio-temporal autocorrelation, which characterizes geophysical phenomena, to obtain more accurate predictions. 2) The learning setting to be considered, i.e., using simple output prediction for each hour or structured output prediction for each day. 3) The learning algorithms: We compare artificial neural networks, most often used for PV prediction forecast, and regression trees for learning adaptive models. The results obtained on two PV power plant datasets show that: taking into account spatio/temporal autocorrelation is beneficial; the structured output prediction setting significantly outperforms the nonstructured output prediction setting; and regression trees provide better models than artificial neural networks.