A Solar Radiation Forecast Platform Spanning over the Edge-Cloud Continuum

Abstract

The prediction of PV output represents an important task for PV farm operators as it enables them to forecast the energy they will produce and sell on the energy market. Existing approaches rely on a combination of satellite/all-sky images and numerical methods which for high spatial resolutions require considerable processing time and resources. In this paper, we propose a hybrid egde–cloud platform that leverages the performance of edge devices to perform time-critical computations locally, while delegating the rest to the remote cloud infrastructure. The proposed platform relies on novel metaheuristics algorithms for cloud dynamics detection and proposes to forecast irradiance by analyzing pixel values taken with various filters/bands. The results demonstrate the scalability improvement when using GPU-enabled devices and the potential of using pixel information instead of cloud types to infer irradiance.