Efficient shrinkage temporal convolutional network model for photovoltaic power prediction

Power stations operating on PhotoVoltaic (PV) power generation are challenged by demand forecasting as PV power generation is random and intermittent. This paper presents an Efficient Shrinkage Temporal Convolutional Network (ESTCN) model, which combines the Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) and an improved Deep Residual Shrinkage Network (DRSN) to forecast PV power output. First, the attention sub-network of the DRSN is improved, the fully connected layer of the sub-network is canceled, and feature extraction is done directly on the model features following global average pooling using a one-dimensional convolution to obtain cross-channel interaction and increased model efficiency. Next, an improved attention mechanism and adaptive soft thresholding are introduced into TCN to automatically determine the noise threshold to address the issue of information weight dispersion caused by redundant information in the input samples. By incorporating dilated causal convolution, attention module, soft thresholding, and residual connection, the ESTCN model is formed and is shown to enhance PV power output prediction with only a minimal increase in the number of parameters. The power station in Ningxia, China is adopted as a validation example with data taken from the year 2020. The fitting and prediction results of the ESTCN model are compared against the Convolutional Neural Network, Long Short-Term Memory, and TCN models. The ESTCN model yielded the following values of the evaluation metrics: Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 1.47 kW, Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.79 kW, and coefficient of determination of 0.999. Compared to the TCN model, the prediction errors based on RMSE and MAE improved by 0.39 kW and 0.18 kW, respectively. Applying the ESTCN model to predict PV power generation of power stations in two regions in China, Ningxia and Xinjiang, shows the ESTCN model to be superior, scalable, and universal over other deep learning models.