Gaining insight into solar photovoltaic power generation forecasting utilizing explainable artificial intelligence tools

Abstract

Over the last two decades, Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches have been applied to various applications of the smart grid, such as demand response, predictive maintenance, and load forecasting. However, AI is still considered to be a “black-box” due to its lack of explainability and transparency, especially for something like solar photovoltaic (PV) forecasts that involves many parameters. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has become an emerging research field in the smart grid domain since it addresses this gap and helps understand why the AI system made a forecast decision. This article presents several use cases of solar PV energy forecasting using XAI tools, such as LIME, SHAP, and ELI5, which can contribute to adopting XAI tools for smart grid applications. Understanding the inner workings of a prediction model based on AI can give insights into the application field. Such insight can provide improvements to the solar PV forecasting models and point out relevant parameters.