Energies, Vol. 19, Pages 409: Dual-Branch Attention Photovoltaic Power Forecasting Model Integrating Ground-Based Cloud Image Features

Energies, Vol. 19, Pages 409: Dual-Branch Attention Photovoltaic Power Forecasting Model Integrating Ground-Based Cloud Image Features

Energies doi: 10.3390/en19020409

Authors:
Lianglin Zou
Hongyang Quan
Jinguo He
Shuai Zhang
Ping Tang
Xiaoshi Xu
Jifeng Song

The photovoltaic field has seen significant development in recent years, with continuously expanding installation capacity and increasing grid integration. However, due to the intermittency of solar energy and meteorological variability, PV output power poses serious challenges to grid security and dispatch reliability. Traditional forecasting methods largely rely on modeling historical power and meteorological data, often neglecting the consideration of cloud movement, which constrains further improvement in prediction accuracy. To enhance prediction accuracy and model interpretability, this paper proposes a dual-branch attention-based PV power prediction model that integrates physical features from ground-based cloud images. Regarding input features, a cloud segmentation model is constructed based on the vision foundation model DINO encoder and an improved U-Net decoder to obtain cloud cover information. Based on deep feature point detection and an attention matching mechanism, cloud motion vectors are calculated to extract cloud motion speed and direction features. For feature processing, feature attention and temporal attention mechanisms are introduced, enabling the model to learn key meteorological factors and critical historical time steps. Structurally, a parallel architecture consisting of a linear branch and a nonlinear branch is adopted. A context-aware fusion module adaptively combines the prediction results from both branches, achieving collaborative modeling of linear trends and nonlinear fluctuations. Comparative experiments were conducted using two years of engineering data. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the benchmarks across multiple metrics, validating the predictive advantages of the dual-branch structure that integrates physical features under complex weather conditions.