Research and development in the field of renewable energy is receiving more attention as a result of the growing demand for clean, sustainable energy. This paper proposes a model for forecasting renewable energy generation. The proposed model consists of three main phases: data preparation, feature selection-based rough set and nutcracker optimization algorithm (NOA), and data classification and cross-validation. First, the missing values are tackled using the mean method. Then, data normalization and data shuffling are applied in the data preparation phase. In the second phase, a new feature selection algorithm is proposed based on rough set theory and NOA, namely RSNOA. The proposed RSNOA is based on adopting the rough set method as the fitness function during the searching mechanism to find the optimal feature subset. Finally, a custom long -short -term memory architecture with the k-fold cross-validation method is utilized in the last phase. The experimental results revealed that the proposed model is very competitive. It is achieved with 4.2113 root mean square error, 0.96 R2, 2.835 mean absolute error, and 4.6349 mean absolute percentage error. The findings also show that the proposed model has great promise as a useful tool for accurately forecasting renewable energy generation across various sources. Web of Science 11 6222 6208