Adaptive Learning Hybrid Model for Solar Intensity Forecasting

Energy management is indispensable in the smart grid, which integrates more renewable energy resources, such as solar and wind. Because of the intermittent power generation from these resources, precise power forecasting has become crucial to achieve efficient energy management. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive learning hybrid model (ALHM) for precise solar intensity forecasting based on meteorological data. We first present a time-varying multiple linear model (TMLM) to capture the linear and dynamic property of the data. We then construct simultaneous confidence bands for variable selection. Next, we apply the genetic algorithm back propagation neural network (GABP) to learn the nonlinear relationships in the data. We further propose ALHM by integrating TMLM, GABP, and the adaptive learning online hybrid algorithm. The proposed ALHM captures the linear, temporal, and nonlinear relationships in the data, and keeps improving the predicting performance adaptively online as more data are collected. Simulation results show that ALHM outperforms several benchmarks in both short-term and long-term solar intensity forecasting.