IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/renene/v263y2026ics0960148126002879.html

STL-Twinsformer-TTAO: A short-term photovoltaic power forecasting model based on seasonal-trend interactive learning

Author

Listed:
  • Xu, Zhuye
  • Li, Songbai
  • Guo, Yucong
  • Qiao, Ru

Abstract

Accurate photovoltaic (PV) power forecasting is critical for ensuring grid stability yet remains impeded by the inherent non-stationarity and uncertainty of solar generation. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the STL-Twinsformer-TTAO framework, a novel model based on seasonal-trend interactive learning. The methodology first employs Seasonal-Trend decomposition using Loess (STL) to decouple raw power series into stationary trend, seasonal, and residual components. These features are subsequently processed by the Twinsformer's interactive dual-stream architecture, where the learning of seasonal patterns actively guides the representation of trend evolution to capture latent coupling relationships. Additionally, the Triangular Topology Aggregation Optimizer (TTAO) is introduced to efficiently determine optimal hyperparameters. Comprehensive evaluations using real-world data from an Australian PV station indicate that the proposed model surpasses eight established baselines, achieving an average Normalized Mean Squared Error (nMSE) reduction of 14.9% across four seasons. Furthermore, robustness experiments at a distinct site, Yulara, reveal a substantial average 31.5% nMSE reduction compared to the baseline model. These findings highlight the model's robustness against spatial heterogeneity, suggesting promising potential for generalization across varying micro-meteorological conditions.

Suggested Citation

  • Xu, Zhuye & Li, Songbai & Guo, Yucong & Qiao, Ru, 2026. "STL-Twinsformer-TTAO: A short-term photovoltaic power forecasting model based on seasonal-trend interactive learning," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 263(C).
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:renene:v:263:y:2026:i:c:s0960148126002879
    DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2026.125462
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148126002879
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.renene.2026.125462?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Liu, Xiangjie & Liu, Yuanyan & Kong, Xiaobing & Ma, Lele & Besheer, Ahmad H. & Lee, Kwang Y., 2023. "Deep neural network for forecasting of photovoltaic power based on wavelet packet decomposition with similar day analysis," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 271(C).
    2. Yu, Sheng & He, Bin & Fang, Lei, 2025. "Multi-step short-term forecasting of photovoltaic power utilizing TimesNet with enhanced feature extraction and a novel loss function," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 388(C).
    3. Wang, Yong & He, Xinbo & Zhou, Ying & Luo, Yongxian & Tang, Yanbing & Narayanan, Govindasami, 2024. "A novel structure adaptive grey seasonal model with data reorganization and its application in solar photovoltaic power generation prediction," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 302(C).
    4. Gu, Bo & Shen, Huiqiang & Lei, Xiaohui & Hu, Hao & Liu, Xinyu, 2021. "Forecasting and uncertainty analysis of day-ahead photovoltaic power using a novel forecasting method," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 299(C).
    5. Hao, Jianhua & Liu, Fangai & Zhang, Weiwei, 2024. "Multi-scale RWKV with 2-dimensional temporal convolutional network for short-term photovoltaic power forecasting," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 309(C).
    6. Aslam, Sheraz & Herodotou, Herodotos & Mohsin, Syed Muhammad & Javaid, Nadeem & Ashraf, Nouman & Aslam, Shahzad, 2021. "A survey on deep learning methods for power load and renewable energy forecasting in smart microgrids," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 144(C).
    7. Timilsina, Govinda R., 2021. "Are renewable energy technologies cost competitive for electricity generation?," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 180(C), pages 658-672.
    8. Zhai, Chao & He, Xinyi & Cao, Zhixiang & Abdou-Tankari, Mahamadou & Wang, Yi & Zhang, Minghao, 2025. "Photovoltaic power forecasting based on VMD-SSA-Transformer: Multidimensional analysis of dataset length, weather mutation and forecast accuracy," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 324(C).
    9. Reichenberg, Lina & Hedenus, Fredrik & Odenberger, Mikael & Johnsson, Filip, 2018. "Tailoring large-scale electricity production from variable renewable energy sources to accommodate baseload generation in europe," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 129(PA), pages 334-346.
    10. Yu, Min & Niu, Dongxiao & Wang, Keke & Du, Ruoyun & Yu, Xiaoyu & Sun, Lijie & Wang, Feiran, 2023. "Short-term photovoltaic power point-interval forecasting based on double-layer decomposition and WOA-BiLSTM-Attention and considering weather classification," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 275(C).
    11. Wang, Xinyu & Ma, Wenping, 2024. "A hybrid deep learning model with an optimal strategy based on improved VMD and transformer for short-term photovoltaic power forecasting," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 295(C).
    12. Choi, Jung & Son, Seok-Woo & Lee, Seungjik & Park, Sangdae, 2024. "Advancing global solar photovoltaic power forecasting with sub-seasonal climate outlooks," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 237(PC).
    13. Gong, Jianqiang & Qu, Zhiguo & Zhu, Zhenle & Xu, Hongtao, 2025. "Parallel TimesNet-BiLSTM model for ultra-short-term photovoltaic power forecasting using STL decomposition and auto-tuning," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 320(C).
    14. Chen Pan & Yuqiao Liu & Yeonjae Oh & Changgyoon Lim, 2024. "Short-Term Photovoltaic Power Forecasting Using PV Data and Sky Images in an Auto Cross Modal Correlation Attention Multimodal Framework," Energies, MDPI, vol. 17(24), pages 1-30, December.
    15. Hu, Zehuan & Gao, Yuan & Ji, Siyu & Mae, Masayuki & Imaizumi, Taiji, 2024. "Improved multistep ahead photovoltaic power prediction model based on LSTM and self-attention with weather forecast data," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 359(C).
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Zou, Jiahao & Wang, Zhaocai & Zhu, Zhaoyang & Tan, Zuowen, 2026. "Explainable and physics-constrained PV power prediction via a hybrid framework Integrating secondary decomposition and improved Transformer-LSTM," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 347(C).
    2. Wang, Tao & Xu, Ye & Qin, Yu & Wang, Xu & Zheng, Feifan & Li, Wei, 2025. "Short-term PV forecasting of multiple scenarios based on multi-dimensional clustering and hybrid transformer-BiLSTM with ECPO," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 334(C).
    3. Tian, Zhirui & Liang, Bingjie, 2025. "PVMTF: End-to-end long-sequence time-series forecasting frameworks based on patch technique and information fusion coding for mid-term photovoltaic power forecasting," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 396(C).
    4. Li, Jiaqian & Rao, Congjun & Gao, Mingyun & Xiao, Xinping & Goh, Mark, 2025. "Efficient calculation of distributed photovoltaic power generation power prediction via deep learning," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 246(C).
    5. Chen, Qingbin & Zhu, Lin & Yang, Dechang, 2026. "An explainable photovoltaic power forecasting method for output based on multi-dimensional similarity game fusion and ISCSO- XGBoost," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 415(C).
    6. Tong, Shuoying & Jiang, Anqi & Luo, Jiabin & Hu, Hao & An, Ziheng & Zhang, Shuqing, 2026. "Dual-channel feature extraction and weather-guided two-stage clustering for short-term photovoltaic power prediction," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 257(C).
    7. Zheng, Feifan & Li, Zhongyan & Xu, Ye & Li, Wei & Wang, Tao, 2026. "A hybrid prediction model of photovoltaic power system based on AP, ISSA-based VMD, CLKAN and error correction," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 226(PC).
    8. Pei, Jingyin & Dong, Yunxuan & Guo, Pinghui & Wu, Thomas & Hu, Jianming, 2024. "A Hybrid Dual Stream ProbSparse Self-Attention Network for spatial–temporal photovoltaic power forecasting," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 305(C).
    9. Liu, Xiangjie & Li, Buchun & Kong, Xiaobing & Ma, Lele & Lee, Kwang Y., 2026. "Short-term interval prediction of photovoltaic power based on decomposition optimization and adaptive bandwidth KDE," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 266(C).
    10. Hua, Dingyan & Zhang, Luliang & Ji, Tianyao & Zhou, Shuai & Qian, Tong, 2026. "FreGAT: An interpretable frequency-domain graph attention transformer for short-term photovoltaic forecasting," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 415(C).
    11. Al-Dahidi, Sameer & Alrbai, Mohammad & Rinchi, Bilal & Alahmer, Hussein & Al-Ghussain, Loiy & Hayajneh, Hassan S. & Alahmer, Ali, 2025. "Techno-economic implications and cost of forecasting errors in solar PV power production using optimized deep learning models," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 323(C).
    12. Bashir, Tasarruf & Wang, Huifang & Tahir, Mustafa & Zhang, Yixiang, 2025. "Wind and solar power forecasting based on hybrid CNN-ABiLSTM, CNN-transformer-MLP models," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 239(C).
    13. Zhiwei Liao & Wenlong Min & Chengjin Li & Bowen Wang, 2024. "Photovoltaic Power Prediction Based on Irradiation Interval Distribution and Transformer-LSTM," Energies, MDPI, vol. 17(12), pages 1-17, June.
    14. Hong Wu & Haipeng Liu & Huaiping Jin & Yanping He, 2024. "Ultra-Short-Term Photovoltaic Power Prediction by NRGA-BiLSTM Considering Seasonality and Periodicity of Data," Energies, MDPI, vol. 17(18), pages 1-19, September.
    15. Wang, Keqi & Wang, Lijie & Meng, Qiang & Yang, Chao & Lin, Yangshu & Zhu, Junye & Zhao, Zhongyang & Zhou, Can & Zheng, Chenghang & Gao, Xiang, 2025. "Accurate photovoltaic power prediction via temperature correction with physics-informed neural networks," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 328(C).
    16. Hao, Jianhua & Liu, Fangai & Zhang, Weiwei, 2024. "Multi-scale RWKV with 2-dimensional temporal convolutional network for short-term photovoltaic power forecasting," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 309(C).
    17. Yongning Zhang & Xiaoying Ren & Fei Zhang & Yulei Liu & Jierui Li, 2024. "A Deep Learning-Based Dual-Scale Hybrid Model for Ultra-Short-Term Photovoltaic Power Forecasting," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 16(17), pages 1-22, August.
    18. Sun, Fengpeng & Li, Longhao & Bian, Dunxin & Bian, Wenlin & Wang, Qinghong & Wang, Shuang, 2025. "Photovoltaic power prediction based on multi-scale photovoltaic power fluctuation characteristics and multi-channel LSTM prediction models," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 246(C).
    19. Wang, Yong & Yan, Gaowei & Xiao, Shuyi & Ren, Mifeng & Cheng, Lan & Zhu, Zhujun, 2025. "Day-ahead solar irradiance prediction based on multi-feature perspective clustering," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 320(C).
    20. Bo Gu & Xi Li & Fengliang Xu & Xiaopeng Yang & Fayi Wang & Pengzhan Wang, 2023. "Forecasting and Uncertainty Analysis of Day-Ahead Photovoltaic Power Based on WT-CNN-BiLSTM-AM-GMM," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(8), pages 1-27, April.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:renene:v:263:y:2026:i:c:s0960148126002879. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/renewable-energy .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.