The recent rapid and sudden growth of solar photovoltaic (PV) technology presents a future challenge for the electricity sector agents responsible for the coordination and distribution of electricity given the direct dependence of this type of technology on climatic and meteorological conditions. Therefore, the development of models that allow reliable future prediction, in the short term, of solar PV generation will be of paramount importance, in order to maintain a balanced and comprehensive operation. This article discusses a method for predicting the generated power, in the short term, of photovoltaic power plants, by means of deep learning techniques. To fulfill the above, a deep learning technique based on the Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) algorithm is evaluated with respect to its ability to forecast solar power data. An evaluation of the performance of the LSTM network has been conducted and compared it with the Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) network using: Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and Coefficient of Determination (R2). The prediction result shows that the LSTM network gives the best results for each category of days, thus it provides reliable information that enables more efficient operation of photovoltaic power plants in the future. The binomial formed by the concepts of deep learning and energy efficiency seems to have a promising future, especially regarding promoting energy sustainability, decarburization, and the digitization of the electricity sector.

Forecasting wind speed has become one of the most attractive topics to researchers in the field of renewable energy due to its use in generating clean energy, and the capacity for integrating it into the electric grid. There are several methods and models for time series forecasting at the present time. Advancements in deep learning methods characterize the possibility of establishing a more developed multistep prediction model than shallow neural networks (SNNs). However, the accuracy and adequacy of long-term wind speed prediction is not yet well resolved. This study aims to find the most effective predictive model for time series, with less errors and higher accuracy in the predictions, using artificial neural networks (ANNs), recurrent neural networks (RNNs), and long short-term memory (LSTM), which is a special type of RNN model, compared to the common autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA). The results are measured by the root mean square error (RMSE) method. The comparison result shows that the LSTM method is more accurate than ARIMA.

Forecasting wind speed is one of the most important and challenging problems in the wind power prediction for electricity generation. Long short-term memory was used as a solution to short-term memory to address the problem of the disappearance or explosion of gradient information during the training process experienced by the recurrent neural network (RNN) when used to study time series. In this study, this problem is addressed by proposing a prediction model based on long short-term memory and a deep neural network developed to forecast the wind speed values of multiple time steps in the future. The weather database in Halifax, Canada was used as a source for two series of wind speeds per hour. Two different seasons spring (March 2015) and summer (July 2015) were used for training and testing the forecasting model. The results showed that the use of the proposed model can effectively improve the accuracy of wind speed prediction.