Forecasting Spatio-Temporal Renewable Scenarios: a Deep Generative Approach

Abstract: The operation and planning of large-scale power systems are becoming more challenging with the increasing penetration of stochastic renewable generation. In order to minimize the decision risks in power systems with large amount of renewable resources, there is a growing need to model the short-term generation uncertainty. By producing a group of possible future realizations for certain set of renewable generation plants, scenario approach has become one popular way for renewables uncertainty modeling. However, due to the complex spatial and temporal correlations underlying in renewable generations, traditional model-based approaches for forecasting future scenarios often require extensive knowledge, while fitted models are often hard to scale. To address such modeling burdens, we propose a learning-based, data-driven scenario forecasts method based on generative adversarial networks (GANs), which is a class of deep-learning generative algorithms used for modeling unknown distributions. We firstly utilize an improved GANs with convergence guarantees to learn the intrinsic patterns and model the unknown distributions of (multiple-site) renewable generation time-series. Then by solving an optimization problem, we are able to generate forecasted scenarios without any scenario number and forecasting horizon restrictions. Our method is totally model-free, and could forecast scenarios under different level of forecast uncertainties. Extensive numerical simulations using real-world data from NREL wind and solar integration datasets validate the performance of proposed method in forecasting both wind and solar power scenarios.