The increasing penetration of non-programmable renewable energy sources (RES) is enforcing the need for accurate power production forecasts. In the category of hydroelectric plants, Run of the River (RoR) plants belong to the class of non-programmable RES. Data-driven models are nowadays the most widely adopted methodologies in hydropower forecast. Among all, the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) proved to be highly successful in production forecast. Widely adopted and equally important for hydropower generation forecast is the HYdrological Predictions for the Environment (HYPE), a semi-distributed hydrological RainfallRunoff model. A novel hybrid method, providing HYPE sub-basins flow computation as input to an ANN, is here introduced and tested both with and without the adoption of a decomposition approach. In the former case, two ANNs are trained to forecast the trend and the residual of the production, respectively, to be then summed up to the previously extracted seasonality component and get the power forecast. These results have been compared to those obtained from the adoption of a ANN with rainfalls in input, again with and without decomposition approach. The methods have been assessed by forecasting the Run-of-the-River hydroelectric power plant energy for the year 2017. Besides, the forecasts of 15 power plants output have been fairly compared in order to identify the most accurate forecasting technique. The here proposed hybrid method (HYPE and ANN) has shown to be the most accurate in all the considered study cases.
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