Constructed regional photovoltaic generation fields improve ultra-short-term distributed solar forecasting

Abstract

Ultra-short-term forecasting of densely distributed photovoltaic (PV) systems remains challenging because external meteorological and satellite products may not adequately resolve rapid local variations, while heterogeneous PV systems exhibit different generation responses under similar atmospheric conditions. Meanwhile, dense PV fleets provide spatially distributed measurements that reveal regional generation dynamics. Here, we reformulate fleet-level PV forecasting from modeling discrete station time series to predicting explicit, spatially structured regional PV generation fields. We develop SatPV-Field, a regional-to-local forecasting framework that transforms distributed PV measurements into image-like generation fields and models their spatiotemporal evolution. By combining historical PV fields with satellite-derived future shortwave radiation guidance and meteorological forecasts, the framework predicts future regional generation states, which subsequently provide location-specific guidance for individual-station forecasting. Experiments involving 496 distributed PV systems, including 446 source stations and 50 held-out target stations, demonstrate that these regional fields can be effectively forecast and used to improve station-level predictions. The proposed approach reduces station-level MAE by approximately 10.0% relative to the best-performing single-station temporal baseline and by 2.5% relative to a graph-based regional forecasting approach using the same source fleet. These findings establish an explicit spatial-field modeling paradigm that connects regional generation dynamics with individual-site forecasting.