Multi-site solar irradiance prediction based on hybrid spatiotemporal graph neural network

Constructing accurate spatiotemporal correlations is a challenging task in joint prediction of multiple photovoltaic sites. Some advanced algorithms for incorporating other surrounding site information have been proposed, such as graph neural network-based methods, which are usually based on static or dynamic graphs to build spatial dependencies between sites. However, the possibility of the simultaneous existence of multiple spatial dependencies is not considered. This paper establishes a spatiotemporal prediction model based on hybrid spatiotemporal graph neural network. In this model, we apply adaptive hybrid graph learning to learn composite spatial correlations among multiple sites. A temporal convolution module with multi-subsequence temporal data input is used to extract local semantic information to better predict future nonlinear temporal dependencies. A spatiotemporal adaptive fusion module is added to address the issue of integrating diverse spatiotemporal trends among multiple sites. To assess the model's predictive performance, nine solar radiation observation stations were selected in two different climatic environments. The average root mean square error (RMSE) of the constructed model was 38.51 and 49.90 W/m2, with average mean absolute error (MAE) of 14.72 and 23.06 W/m2, respectively. Single-site and multi-site prediction models were selected as baseline models. Compared with the baseline models, the RMSE and MAE reduce by 3.1%–20.8% and 8.9%–32.8%, respectively, across all sites. The proposed model demonstrates the effectiveness of improving accuracy in forecasting solar irradiance through multi-site predictions.