A renewable energy forecasting and control approach to secured edge-level efficiency in a distributed micro-grid

Energy forecasting using Renewable energy sources (RESs) is gradually gaining weight in the research field due to the benefits it presents to the modern-day environment. Not only does energy forecasting using renewable energy sources help mitigate the greenhouse effect, it also helps to conserve energy for future use. Over the years, several methods for energy forecasting have been proposed, all of which were more concerned with the accuracy of the prediction models with little or no considerations to the operating environment. This research, however, proposes the uses of Deep Neural Network (DNN) for energy forecasting on mobile devices at the edge of the network. This ensures low latency and communication overhead for all energy forecasting operations since they are carried out at the network periphery. Nevertheless, the cloud would be used as a support for the mobile devices by providing permanent storage for the locally generated data and a platform for offloading resource-intensive computations that exceed the capabilities of the local mobile devices as well as security for them. Electrical network topology was proposed which allows seamless incorporation of multiple RESs into the distributed renewable energy source (D-RES) network. Moreover, a novel grid control algorithm that uses the forecasting model to administer a well-coordinated and effective control for renewable energy sources (RESs) in the electrical network is designed. The electrical network was simulated with two RESs and a DNN model was used to create a forecasting model for the simulated network. The model was trained using a dataset from a solar power generation company in Belgium (elis) and was experimented with a different number of layers to determine the optimum architecture for performing the forecasting operations. The performance of each architecture was evaluated using the mean square error (MSE) and the r-square.