*Article* **An Improved Generating Energy Prediction Method Based on Bi-LSTM and Attention Mechanism**

**Bo He 1, Runze Ma 2, Wenwei Zhang 2,3, Jun Zhu 4,\* and Xingyuan Zhang 1,\***

	- Academy of Opto-Electric Technology, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China

**Abstract:** The energy generated by a photovoltaic power station is affected by environmental factors, and the prediction of the generating energy would be helpful for power grid scheduling. Recently, many power generation prediction models (PGPM) based on machine learning have been proposed, but few existing methods use the attention mechanism to improve the prediction accuracy of generating energy. In the paper, a PGPM based on the Bi-LSTM model and attention mechanism was proposed. Firstly, the environmental factors with respect to the generating energy were selected through the Pearson coefficient, and then the principle and implementation of the proposed PGPM were detailed. Finally, the performance of the proposed PGPM was evaluated through an actual data set collected from a photovoltaic power station in Suzhou, China. The experimental results showed that the prediction error of proposed PGPM was only 8.6 kWh, and the fitting accuracy was more than 0.99, which is better than existing methods.

**Keywords:** Bi-LSTM; artificial neural networks; generating energy prediction
