A TCN-Attention Model for High-Accuracy Solar Energy Generation Forecasting
Predictions of solar power output that are close to the mark may help with grid stability, energy management, and the integration of renewable energy sources. Prediction using conventional statistical models is challenging due to the substantial influence of nonlinear meteorological variables and temporal variations on solar power output. A deep learning-based forecasting framework integrating an attention mechanism and a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) is proposed in this study to enhance the precision of solar energy prediction. A number of feature engineering and pre-processing approaches are used by the model, including lag features, rolling statistics, temporal indicators, and outlier reduction using the Interquartile Range (IQR) methodology. To store long-range temporal associations, the TCN architecture employs dilated causal convolutions; the attention mechanism highlights the most important time steps in the input sequence. The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and traditional TCN when tested on a publicly available solar energy dataset. It can accomplish 253.32 MW Mean Absolute Error (MAE), 325.04 MW Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), 2.30% Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), and 0.9804 Coefficient of Determination (R2). These parameters are evaluated by experimental means.