A temporal distributed hybrid deep learning model for day-ahead distributed PV power forecasting

•A linear components extraction method is proposed to identify the daily fluctuating patterns of the solar power series.•A scenarios generation algorithm is proposed to provide forecasting linear trend data.•Temporal distributed deep learning models are developed based on the detected daily fluctuating patterns of the PV power generation.•The proposed algorithm can provide accurate day-ahead solar power forecasts for distributed PV farms without local weather information. In recent years, the integration of distributed photovoltaic has witnessed explosive growth because of its great economic and environmental benefits. However, the intermittence and randomicity of PV power generation are challenging the stable and economic operation of active distribution system, especially when the local historical and forecasting meteorological data are not available. Thus, this paper presents a novel Gated Recurrent Unit based hybrid model for forecasting distributed PV power generations. The proposed method uses locally historical PV power generation data to forecast one-day-ahead solar power time series with five-minute intervals. First, a linear components extraction method is proposed to identify the daily fluctuating patterns of the solar power series. Then, temporal distributed Gated Recurrent Unit models are developed based on the detected daily fluctuating patterns of the PV power generation. A scenarios generation algorithm is proposed to provide forecasting linear trend data for each Gated Recurrent Unit model. Finally, the daily linear series scenarios, the linear and nonlinear parts of the historical data are fed into the Gated Recurrent Unit to forecast the PV generation. Data collected from an actual distributed PV farm in southeastern China are utilized to validate the effectiveness of the proposed model. The results show that the proposed model can provide a nominalized root mean square error of 6.83% and a nominalized mean absolute error of 4.12%. Compared to a single Gated Recurrent Unit forecasting model, the developed model has improved the forecasting accuracy by 62.7%.