Hybrid machine learning model combining of CNN-LSTM-RF for time series forecasting of Solar Power Generation

Forecasting solar power generation (SPG) is vital for the development and planning of power systems, offering significant benefits in terms of technical performance and financial efficiency. It enhances system reliability, safety, stability and it reduces the operational costs. This paper's primary goal is to develop models that can precisely forecast solar power generation by analyzing real first-hand dataset of solar power. The value of these forecasting models lies in their ability to anticipate future solar power generation, thus optimizing resource use and minimizing expenses. To achieve this, the study utilizes various classical machine learning, deep learning, and hybrid machine learning techniques, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Units (GRU), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Regression (SVR), Bi-directional LSTM (Bi-LSTM), and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Among these, the hybrid model combining CNN-LSTM-RF demonstrated superior accuracy with R-squared of 92 %, a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 0.07 kW, and a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.05 kW. This indicates that the hybrid machine learning model combining of CNN-LSTM-RF is effective in forecasting solar power generation.