FarSky: Task-Aware Latent-Space Coupling for Generative Intra-Hour Solar Forecasting

Researchers propose FarSky, a generative forecasting framework using latent-space coupling to improve intra-hour solar irradiance forecasts, achieving up to 11 percentage points higher forecast skill and F1-scores above 60% for ramp event detection. The framework, developed with a multi-year all-sky imager dataset from Plataforma Solar de Almería, Spain, outperforms persistence and state-of-the-art methods on two independent test datasets.

arXiv:2608.11254v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate solar irradiance forecasting is essential for the reliable integration of photovoltaic power into modern electricity grids. All-sky imagers ASI provide high-resolution observations of clouds, making them well suited for intra-hour forecasting. Recent deep learning approaches have substantially improved forecast accuracy but are often limited by deterministic predictions and a reduced capability to anticipate ramp events. This work proposes FarSky, a generative forecasting framework that leverages latent-space coupling to learn task-aware representations of sky images. A multi-task autoencoder first learns a shared latent representation for image reconstruction and irradiance estimation. A latent diffusion model then generates future latent states conditioned on recent observations, from which irradiance forecasts are directly decoded. Probabilistic forecasts are inherently obtained through stochastic sampling. The framework is developed using a multi-year ASI dataset acquired at the Plataforma Solar de Almer\'ia, Spain, and evaluated on two independent test datasets against persistence, state-of-the-art end-to-end, and generative forecasting approaches. FarSky achieves the best overall deterministic and probabilistic forecasting performance, improving forecast skill by up to 11 percentage points. Furthermore, it substantially improves ramp event detection over existing methods, achieving F1-scores above 60%. These results demonstrate the potential of combining generative models with task-aware latent-space coupling for solar forecasting.