A Weak-Coupling Flow-Power Forecasting Method for Small Hydropower Station Group

Due to the need for rural revitalization and renewable energy utilization, a large quantity of small hydropower stations is emerging, with weak-coupling flow-power features. However, a weak spatial coupling exists between the distribution of small hydropower station groups (SHSGs) and gaging stations since the small hydropower stations are usually located in remote areas lacking hydrographic facilities. That may cause weak or no coupling between the hydroregime and the power output of small hydropower plants in the target basin, thus hindering accurate power forecasting. To meet the need for short-term power generation prediction for SHSGs in intensive management areas, we propose a data-driven power-forecasting model which can mine the correlation information of weakly coupled basins while transferring hydrological knowledge to uncoupled basins. First, to make the task data domains before and after migration more similar, a similar watershed matching algorithm based on the nonlinear dimensionality reduction algorithm (Isomap) and the k -means++ algorithm is proposed; then a short-term interpretable runoff prediction model is pretrained, and features are extracted in the source basin using the temporal fusion transformer (TFT) network. After that, a heuristic ensemble fine-tuning model based on the k -fold cross-validation fine-tuning method and heuristic ensemble algorithm is proposed to transfer the public knowledge of the source basin to the uncoupled basin. Then, a TFT network is used to mine the weak-coupling relationship between the hydrological regime and the output power of an SHSG. Finally, the validity of the model is verified with an example from a European region. After considering the weakly coupled flow-power characteristics, the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of three SHSGs’ power prediction by the proposed method is on average 34.8% lower than that of the method without considering the hydrological information.