Research Article
A Hybrid Deep Learning-Based Network for Photovoltaic
Power Forecasting
Altaf Hussain ,
1
Zulfiqar Ahmad Khan ,
1
Tanveer Hussain ,
1
Fath U Min Ullah ,
1
Seungmin Rho ,
2
and Sung Wook Baik
1
1
Sejong University, Seoul 143-747, Republic of Korea
2
Department of Industrial Security, Chung-Ang University, Seoul 06974, Republic of Korea
Correspondence should be addressed to Sung Wook Baik; sbaik@sejong.ac.kr
Received 13 May 2022; Revised 7 July 2022; Accepted 15 July 2022; Published 5 October 2022
Academic Editor: Chun Wei
Copyright © 2022 Altaf Hussain et al. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
For efficient energy distribution, microgrids (MG) provide significant assistance to main grids and act as a bridge between the
power generation and consumption. Renewable energy generation resources, particularly photovoltaics (PVs), are considered as a
clean source of energy but are highly complex, volatile, and intermittent in nature making their forecasting challenging. us, a
reliable, optimized, and a robust forecasting method deployed at MG objectifies these challenges by providing accurate renewable
energy production forecasting and establishing a precise power generation and consumption matching at MG. Furthermore, it
ensures effective planning, operation, and acquisition from the main grid in the case of superior or inferior amounts of energy,
respectively. erefore, in this work, we develop an end-to-end hybrid network for automatic PV power forecasting, comprising
three basic steps. Firstly, data preprocessing is performed to normalize, remove the outliers, and deal with the missing values
prominently. Next, the temporal features are extracted using deep sequential modelling schemes, followed by the extraction of
spatial features via convolutional neural networks. ese features are then fed to fully connected layers for optimal PV power
forecasting. In the third step, the proposed model is evaluated on publicly available PV power generation datasets, where its
performance reveals lower error rates when compared to state-of-the-art methods.
1. Introduction
Photovoltaic (PV) power generation is one of the easiest-to-
access, low-cost, and most promising sources of renewable
energy. When the energy demands rise in the developing
country, the PV power generation annually increases;
therefore, it mitigates the global energy and climatic change
crisis [1]. According to the Global Future Report, by 2050,
the PV generation capacity will reach 8000 GW [2]. How-
ever, different atmospheric variables such as temperature,
solar irradiance, humidity, and cloud properties cause sig-
nificant uncertainty in integrating PVs to microgrid (MG)
[3–7]. In contrast, an effective PV power forecasting model
greatly improves solar power utilization [8–10]. erefore,
efficient forecasting models in the utility grid will operate the
power grid economically and transfer the required energy to
the end-users [11, 12]. Over the years, for efficient energy
management and distribution, MG has played an important
role in ensuring reliability, two-way power flow, self-healing,
and demand response [6]. Although MG offers several
advantages, due to the volatile and intermittent nature of PV
power, integrating a larger portion of renewable energy into
existing power generating systems creates several challenges,
such as load and demand mismatch, poor scheduling, op-
eration, penalties enforced by customers, and fluctuations in
the load connected to the power systems. To tackle these
challenges, integrating an intelligent forecasting model into
the MG greatly reduces the aforementioned problems.
Forecasting PV power belongs to the time series (TS)
forecasting problem which are divided into univariate and
multivariate forecasting [13]. Based on the time horizon,
these methods are divided into three types, such as long-
Hindawi
Complexity
Volume 2022, Article ID 7040601, 12 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/7040601