This project presents an extension to the GraphCast model, a state-of-the-art graph neural network (GNN) for global weather forecasting, by integrating solar energy production forecasting capabilities. The proposed approach leverages the weather forecasts generated by GraphCast and trains a neural network model to predict the ratio of actual solar output to potential solar output based on various weather conditions. The model architecture consists of an input layer corresponding to weather features (temperature, humidity, dew point, wind speed, rain, barometric pressure, and altitude), two hidden layers with ReLU activations, and an output layer predicting solar radiation. The model is trained using a mean absolute error loss function and Adam optimizer. The results demonstrate the model's effectiveness in accurately predicting solar radiation, with its convergence behavior, decreasing training loss, and accurate prediction of solar radiation patterns suggesting successful learning of the underlying relationships between weather conditions and solar radiation. The integration of solar energy production forecasting with GraphCast offers valuable insights for the renewable energy sector, enabling better planning and decision-making based on expected solar energy production. Future work could explore further model refinements, incorporation of additional weather variables, and extension to other renewable energy sources.

Solar energy is now the cheapest form of electricity in history. Unfortunately, significantly increasing the grid's fraction of solar energy remains challenging due to its variability, which makes balancing electricity's supply and demand more difficult. While thermal generators' ramp rate -- the maximum rate that they can change their output -- is finite, solar's ramp rate is essentially infinite. Thus, accurate near-term solar forecasting, or nowcasting, is important to provide advance warning to adjust thermal generator output in response to solar variations to ensure a balanced supply and demand. To address the problem, this paper develops a general model for solar nowcasting from abundant and readily available multispectral satellite data using self-supervised learning. Specifically, we develop deep auto-regressive models using convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short-term memory networks (LSTM) that are globally trained across multiple locations to predict raw future observations of the spatio-temporal data collected by the recently launched GOES-R series of satellites. Our model estimates a location's future solar irradiance based on satellite observations, which we feed to a regression model trained on smaller site-specific solar data to provide near-term solar photovoltaic (PV) forecasts that account for site-specific characteristics. We evaluate our approach for different coverage areas and forecast horizons across 25 solar sites and show that our approach yields errors close to that of a model using ground-truth observations.

Edwin V. Bonilla School of Computer Science and Engineering University of New South Wales Sydney, Australia We consider multi-task regression models where the observations are assumed to be a linear combination of several latent node functions and weight functions, which are both drawn from Gaussian process priors. Driven by the problem of developing scalable methods for distributed solar power forecasting, we propose coupled priors over groups of (node or weight) processes to estimate a forecast model for solar power production at multiple distributed sites, exploiting spatial dependence between functions. Our results show that our approach provides better quantification of predictive uncertainties than competing benchmarks while maintaining high point-prediction accuracy.