Satellite-Text-Prompted Large Language Model for Photovoltaic Power Forecasting

Photovoltaic (PV) power forecasting is critical for the operation of solar power plants and the coordination of energy within power grids. This work aims to predict future PV power time series by leveraging multimodal data. While recent studies have incorporated numerical modalities such as satellite image sequences and numerical weather prediction (NWP) time series, they often overlook textual modali-ties—such as the spatio-temporal context of PV plants—and the potential of pretrained large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we build upon existing numerical inputs and further explore the use of spatio-temporal text prompts, generated based on plant coordinates and forecast start time, to enhance the forecasting process. We propose PV-LLM, a satellite-text-prompted framework that integrates a pretrained LLM to improve PV power forecasting. The framework consists of three key components: Text Prompt Construction, Modality-Specific Encoding, and Adaptive Prompt Tuning. First, the Text Prompt Construction module generates spatiotemporal prompts that offer high-level semantic guidance. Next, the Modality-Specific Encoding module encodes each modality according to its unique characteristics, capturing modality-specific patterns while managing varying context lengths. Finally, the Adaptive Prompt Tuning module fine-tunes the LLM to integrate multimodal embeddings, while an adaptive gating mechanism retains its pretrained knowledge. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on a real-world dataset containing multiple PV plants. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.