Data-driven fault detection in renewable energy systems using hybrid machine learning techniques

Abstract

Abstract. The explosive growth of grid-connected renewable energy systems (RES) has increased the complexity of the operation of the modern power infrastructure, making the detection of the faults reliably an inevitable condition of the stable functioning and safety. Traditional single-algorithm and rule-based monitoring systems are not sufficiently flexible or discriminatory to distinguish between the many varieties of faults that occur in photovoltaic (PV) arrays, wind turbines, battery management systems, and grid-tie inverters. The paper suggests a new stacking-ensemble hybrid machine learning model that will combine a one-dimensional convolutional neural network with a bidirectional long short-term memory (CNN-BiLSTM) module, a Random Forest classifier, and an XGBoost gradient booster as base learners under the guidance of a logistic regression meta-learner. Publicly available SCADA and lab bench data were used to create a curated multi-source dataset of 8,400 labelled samples to represent five operational states. The proposed framework achieved an accuracy of 97.8, a macro-averaged F1-score of 97.1, and a Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.972, outperforming all the compared baseline methods at least by 3.3 percentage points. The findings verify the effectiveness of the hybrid stacking paradigm in identifying faults in real-time and multiple classes in heterogeneous renewable energy settings.