Solar energy forecasting using intelligent techniques: A step towards sustainable power generating system

Abstract

The rapid advancements in the technology, increase in comfort levels, movement of population to urban areas, depletion of fossil fuels and increasing greenhouse gas emissions have invigorated the use of renewable energy resources for power generation in the last few years. The major renewable energy resources which have potential to fulfill the requirements includes solar energy, wind energy, small hydro and biomass etc. Among these major resources, solar energy-based technology is considered as one of the fastest growing technology because of its various advantages and ubiquitous availability of the resources. However, there are certain challenges in the utilization of solar energy for power generation because of various uncertainties in the atmosphere. As a result, the power generated from solar based power plants is fluctuating in nature which is not desirable. Therefore, the utilities are adopting the smart grid approach which has ability to integrate the solar power plants efficiently and the solar energy forecasting is one of the essential tools for this new model. In this paper, AI based techniques are utilized to forecast solar energy using high quality measured solar irradiance data. The forecasting accuracy of the developed models is evaluated based on statistical indices such as absolute relative error and mean absolute percentage error. The results obtained from the developed models are compared to observe the forecasting ability and performance with the high-quality measured data and found accurate.