Day-ahead renewable scenario forecasts based on generative adversarial networks

<p>With the increasing penetration of renewable resources such as wind and solar, the operation and planning of power systems, especially in terms of large-scale integration, are faced with great risks due to the inherent stochasticity of natural resources. Although this uncertainty can be anticipated, the timing, magnitude, and duration of fluctuations cannot be predicted accurately. In addition, the outputs of renewable power sources are correlated in space and time, and this brings further challenges for predicting the characteristics of their future behavior. To address these issues, this paper describes an unsupervised method for renewable scenario forecasts that considers spatiotemporal correlations based on generative adversarial networks (GANs), which have been shown to generate high-quality samples. We first utilized an improved GAN to learn unknown data distributions and model the dynamic processes of renewable resources. We then generated a large number of forecasted scenarios using stochastic constrained optimization. For validation, we used power-generation data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory wind and solar integration datasets. The experimental results validated the effectiveness of our proposed method and indicated that it has significant potential in renewable scenario analysis.</p>