Accurate renewable energy forecasting is essential to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and enabling grid decarbonization. However, current approaches fail to effectively integrate the rich spatial context of weather patterns with their temporal evolution. This work introduces a novel approach that treats weather maps as tokens in transformer sequences to predict renewable energy. Hourly weather maps are encoded as spatial tokens using a lightweight convolutional neural network, and then processed by a transformer to capture temporal dynamics across a 45-hour forecast horizon. Despite disadvantages in input initialization, evaluation against ENTSO-E operational forecasts shows a reduction in RMSE of about 60% and 20% for wind and solar respectively. A live dashboard showing daily forecasts is available at: https://www.sardiniaforecast.ifabfoundation.it.

As global warming increases the complexity of weather patterns; the precision of weather forecasting becomes increasingly important. Our study proposes a novel preprocessing method and convolutional autoencoder model developed to improve the interpretation of synoptic weather maps. These are critical for meteorologists seeking a thorough understanding of weather conditions. This model could recognize historical synoptic weather maps that nearly match current atmospheric conditions, marking a significant step forward in modern technology in meteorological forecasting. This comprises unsupervised learning models like VQ-VQE, as well as supervised learning models like VGG16, VGG19, Xception, InceptionV3, and ResNet50 trained on the ImageNet dataset, as well as research into newer models like EfficientNet and ConvNeXt. Our findings proved that, while these models perform well in various settings, their ability to identify comparable synoptic weather maps has certain limits. Our research, motivated by the primary goal of significantly increasing meteorologists' efficiency in labor-intensive tasks, discovered that cosine similarity is the most effective metric, as determined by a combination of quantitative and qualitative assessments to accurately identify relevant historical weather patterns. This study broadens our understanding by shifting the emphasis from numerical precision to practical application, ensuring that our model is effective in theory practical, and accessible in the complex and dynamic field of meteorology.