Technical Comparative Benchmarking Study: Advanced AI Hybrid Methods for Renewable Energy Farm Optimization and Forecasting

This study provides a comprehensive benchmarking of conventional machine learning (ML), ensemble learning, deep neural networks, recurrent architectures, Transformers, graph based models, and hybrid ensemble deep learning approaches under complementary renewable energy scenarios. Three datasets are considered: a large scale WEC dataset, a 16 WEC dataset, and operational 10 min SCADA measurements at the Penmanshiel wind farm. For structured WEC layout data, tree ensembles exhibited a clear advantage over conventional ML and neural predictors because randomized partitioning and boosting efficiently captured nonlinear layout power interactions without requiring explicit feature representation learning. The Extra Trees was the strongest model, achieving considerable results. Relative to the MLP baseline, this corresponds to an approximately 63.7% reduction in MAE, demonstrating the suitability of randomized tree ensembles for high dimensional structured WEC data. Also, STGCN reduced the MAE to approximately 167.0 kW and achieved R = 0.93 by explicitly learning spatial and temporal turbine interactions. The best overall forecasting accuracy was obtained by the RF BiLSTM hybrid, with an MAE=150.5 kW. Compared with standalone LSTM, this represents an approximately 75% reduction in MAE, while improving on STGCN by approximately 10.0%. Finally, the experiments reveal that no single AI architecture is universally optimal: randomized and boosted ensembles are particularly effective for structured WEC surrogate modeling, graph networks become advantageous when explicit spatial interactions dominate, and ensemble recurrent hybrids provide the strongest balance when nonlinear tabular relationships and temporal dynamics coexist.

Modeling spatio-temporal locality in multi-step forecasting of geo-referenced time series

Forecasting future measurements from geographically distributed sensors is essential across many domains. However, the spatial distribution of these sensors raises multiple challenges, primarily due to spatial autocorrelation phenomena, that introduce inter-dependencies among nearby locations, that cannot therefore be treated independently. While some existing approaches can capture such phenomena, they generally model the spatial dimension globally across all locations. On the other hand, the method we propose in this paper, called SPALT, focuses on capturing spatial relationships among time series with similar trends, even if they occur at different times, thus modeling the spatio-temporal locality. SPALT leverages linear model trees, which allow us to consider the spatial autocorrelation locally: during the tree-building process, the adopted heuristics group time series exhibiting similar trends into the same node, on which additional features considering the spatial dimension are selectively injected. Additionally, we propose a new pruning strategy, based on Reduced Error Pruning, that also considers the spatio-temporal locality during the tree simplification. Designed for a multi-step setting, SPALT provides forecasts for multiple future time steps across multiple sensors simultaneously. The characteristics exhibited by SPALT can provide significant benefits in different domains, where measurements come from distributed sensors. In this paper, we focus on data produced by sensors located in multiple renewable power plants measuring their energy production at regular, short intervals. Experiments on 3 real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SPALT in forecasting the production of energy at different time horizons, and its superior performance in comparison with tree-based models and state-of-the-art neural networks that incorporate both temporal and spatial dimensions.

Skillful forecasting of offshore winds from satellite scatterometer constellations

Accurate intraday forecasts of offshore wind are becoming increasingly important for power system operation and the integration of growing shares of offshore wind energy. Operational forecasts rely predominantly on numerical weather prediction (NWP), which is not optimized for lead times of minutes to hours, where initial-condition accuracy dominates forecast skill. Although satellite scatterometer observations are routinely assimilated into NWP, they have not previously been used directly for forecasting. Here we present WindCastNet, the first satellite-based nowcasting framework for offshore wind speed and direction, introducing a new paradigm for intraday forecasting that learns from spatiotemporally irregular satellite observations. WindCastNet predicts offshore wind fields from observations acquired by satellite scatterometer constellations. WindCastNet employs a partial convolutional long short-term memory network that exploits microwave radar observations from the European, Chinese, and Indian scatterometers despite their irregular spatial coverage, asynchronous sampling, and variable revisit times. Spatial observation masks and inter-observation intervals are encoded, while a continuous temporal representation enables forecasts at arbitrary lead times. Evaluated over the North Sea, WindCastNet reduces the root-mean-square error by 23% and 7% relative to the HARMONIE MEPS model at lead times of 1 and 2 h, respectively, and outperforms persistence by 9-15% during the first three forecast hours. Forecast skill decreases under strong-wind conditions and spatially non-uniform flow. These results demonstrate that satellite scatterometer constellations can provide an independent and competitive source of short-term offshore wind forecasts, opening new opportunities for renewable energy forecasting but also broader marine weather applications, including tropical cyclone nowcasting.

Zhinv: Real-time hub-height wind field reconstruction using only local sparse observations

The high proportion of wind power connected to the grid places higher demands on fine-grained knowledge of regional wind fields. Since the wind information directly obtainable in actual operations is mostly sparse, discrete, and irregularly distributed local observations, it is difficult to directly meet the needs of tasks such as wind power regulation, wind resource assessment, and low-altitude environmental perception of continuous regional wind fields. Therefore, we propose Zhinv, an end-to-end reconstruction framework that directly weaves sparse and irregular observations into a fine-grid wind field at hub-height. Experiments in Northeast China, Europe, and Southeast Asia demonstrate that Zhinv can accurately, robustly, and efficiently reconstruct fine-grid wind fields from sparse observations, reducing the error by about 66% compared with Kriging. With local wind-power observations as input, Zhinv enables wind power centers to bypass NWP and complex assimilation processes, supporting direct and real-time wind resource assessment from locally available data.

Improving Wind and Solar Power Prediction with Efficient Wrapper-based Feature Selection: An Empirical Study

With rising global energy demand and growing awareness of climate change and its impacts, the share of renewable energies in the global energy mix continues to grow. Unlike conventional power generation, the output of renewable energy sources cannot be controlled as consistently due to their dependence on environmental conditions. Therefore, reliable prediction of current and future energy production is essential. In this paper, we report findings from two structured literature reviews on real-world renewable energy prediction tasks: wind turbine power curve modeling and photovoltaic power prediction. For the former, we conducted a comprehensive literature review ourselves, while for the latter, we synthesize the key findings regarding frequently selected input features based on an existing survey. Across both domains, our analysis reveals that despite the large number of available monitoring and environmental variables, only limited or unsystematic methods for feature selection exist. To address this gap, we propose Cluster-based Sequential Feature Selection (CSFS), a novel, model-agnostic, clustering-based wrapper method for automatic, efficient, and reliable feature selection in renewable energy prediction pipelines. To support reproducibility and reuse, we provide an open-source implementation of CSFS on GitHub. We empirically evaluate the proposed approach on both use cases and compare it with established feature selection techniques such as wrapper-based sequential feature selection (SFS), filter-based methods, and Random Forest's embedded feature importance. The results show that the wrapper-based methods overall provide better-performing selections of features. CSFS achieves a predictive performance comparable to SFS while reducing computational cost by an average of 21%.

Comparing Socially-Equitable Renewable Energy Budget Allocation MDP Policies in Mature and Emerging Economies

Equitable renewable-energy planning is a sequential decision problem, but the decision variables available to a public planner differ sharply between mature and emerging economies. In the former the government largely builds generation, while in the latter it steers private investment through incentives and quotas. We formulate socially-equitable renewable-energy budget allocation as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and, using a single problem-agnostic solver interface, compare the same policies across the two settings: eight U.S. cities (a mature economy) and West Java, Indonesia (an emerging economy). The results show that across both settings, a receding-horizon value-iteration policy dominates. In the U.S., it reaches 66% renewable penetration while cutting the underserved low-income population by 96% versus a random baseline. In West Java it closes the low-access gap while crowding in the most private capital. More interestingly, a naive market-chasing heuristic, which is mildly sub-optimal in the U.S., could yield catastrophic outcomes in Indonesia, by underserving every low-access region, because chasing attractive markets and serving the underserved goals diverge once the planner acts through private developers.

Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning for Multi Objective Battery Management in Dairy Farms

The dairy industry in Ireland has a large potential for the integration of renewable energy and the reduction of carbon emissions. However, researchers of distributed generation control are mainly focused on residential and commercial applications. To contribute to the effective integration of renewable energy in the dairy sector, this paper presents a multi-objective optimisation control system based on differential evolution and multi agent Deep Reinforcement Learning. The proposed control is organised in two layers: the upper layer uses dynamic pricing, and the lower layer is based on multi-agent reinforcement learning for battery management. This paper also simulates the electrical response of the proposed control system in a rural distribution circuit. The simulation results show that the proposed control framework can improve profits from energy arbitrage up to 18% compared to using Rule-based models, increase the use of distributed generation without significantly increasing cost, and comply with the Irish grid code in terms of voltage variation.

A Hybrid CNN-LSTM Intrusion Detection Framework for Cybersecurity in Smart Renewable Energy Grids

The accelerated digitalization of renewable energy smart grids through IoT sensors, AMI, and SCADA systems has significantly expanded the attack surface for sophisticated cyberattacks, FDI attacks that stealthily distort state estimation and DoS/DDoS attacks that flood communication channels. Current IDS, however, exhibit three inherent limitations: inadequate modeling of the temporal progression of multi-step attacks, degraded scalability under extremely skewed class distributions of standard benchmark datasets, and restricted generalization across heterogeneous network environments. In this study, we present a Hybrid CNN-LSTM IDS that jointly exploits CNN-based spatial feature extraction and LSTM-based temporal sequence modeling, enabling the detection of instantaneous volumetric anomalies and gradually evolving low and slow-attack campaigns in real time. The model was trained using a seven-step preprocessing workflow comprising missing-value imputation, min-max normalization, one-hot encoding, SMOTE class balancing, mutual-information feature selection, causal temporal sequence construction (T=10), and stratified partitioning. LSTM (96.1%), Random Forest (93.5%), SVM (91.2%) and KNN (89.7%); in NSL-KDD, it reaches 98.2% precision versus 96.4% (LSTM), 95.2% (CNN), 92.7% (Random Forest) and 90.8% (SVM), with margins of 2-9 percentage points in all measures. An ablation analysis identified SMOTE balancing as the most influential design choice (-3.7~pp F1 without it). The model achieves a real-time inference throughput of 27,800 flows/s on GPU and 0.082 ms/sample CPU latency in FP32,, with INT8 quantization providing an additional 3.1 x speedup at 0.3% accuracy loss, confirming deployment feasibility on resource-constrained IEDs with <128MB memory and establishing a deployable deep-learning framework for securing next-generation renewable energy smart grid infrastructure.

SolarTformer: A Transformer Based Deep Learning Approach for Short Term Solar Power Forecasting

Accurate forecasting of solar power output is essential for efficient integration of renewable energy into the grid. In this study, an attention-based deep learning model, inspired by transformer architecture, is used for short-term solar power forecasting. Our proposed model, "SolarTformer", is designed to predict solar power output from meteorological data. Unlike traditional models, SolarTformer leverages self-attention mechanisms to effectively capture temporal dependencies and spatial variability in solar irradiance. In addition, the proposed methodology includes feeding power station-specific metadata into the model, which helps to generalize between power stations located at different locations and with different panel configurations and in different seasons. Our experiments demonstrate that SolarTformer significantly outperforms previous models on the same data set. In particular, the model exhibits strong performance on both clear and cloudy days, indicating high robustness and generalizability. These findings highlight the potential of attention-based architectures in enhancing the accuracy of solar forecasting, contributing to a more reliable management of renewable energy.