Robust day-ahead solar forecasting with endogenous data and sliding windows

Abstract

Renewable energy forecasting services comprise various modules for intra-day and day-ahead forecasts. This work specifically addresses day-ahead forecasts, utilizing specifications based on endogenous, historical measurements. These specifications are designed to be computationally efficient, requiring fewer input variables and less training data. Such weather-independent specifications serve as benchmarks against the more computationally demanding forecasts based on numerical weather predictions. A series of experiments, designed to simulate the real-world application of an online system, were conducted on sliding windows of back-contact photovoltaic (installed at KAUST, Saudi Arabia) output series, solar irradiance recorded in Hawaii, and simulated data. Our analysis evaluated 24 specifications, which are variants of (i) functional time series models (including two novel shrinkage procedures); (ii) time series nearest neighbor schemes; (iii) exponential smoothing procedures; (iv) autoregressive integrated moving average processes; (v) automatic techniques based on time series decomposition; and (vi) the persistence model. In addition to employing outlier-robust accuracy metrics, such as mean absolute error, our evaluation also prioritized prediction-interval accuracy, quantified by the mean scaled interval score. Our findings suggest that practitioners can achieve significant improvements over the persistence model by forecasting daily profiles using adaptive nonparametric or functional data analysis-based procedures. Moreover, applying shrinkage to nearest neighbor (NN) forecasts toward smooth, average daily profiles significantly enhances NN performance. Conversely, some popular, computationally intensive models fail to perform adequately to justify their additional cost.