Comparing support vector regression for PV power forecasting to a physical modeling approach using measurement, numerical weather prediction, and cloud motion data

Abstract The growth of installed photovoltaic (PV) power capacity in recent years has emerged an increasing interest in high quality forecasts. The most common ways to predict PV power output are either applying statistical approaches to PV measurements or calculating future outputs of a PV module with known specification applying a PV simulation model to irradiance forecasts. In this work, we compare these two concepts to a statistical learning model, i.e., support vector regression (SVR), that is applied on a large dataset of PV power measurements, numerical weather predictions, and satellite-based cloud motion vector forecasts. To achieve a high forecast accuracy with SVR, we first perform an extensive parameter optimization on a subset of all available PV systems for pre-selected days. We limit the input features of the SVR to those of the other models to increase comparability between the different approaches. Despite these limitations, the SVR shows promising results, especially in comparison with the physical approaches without any statistical improvements. A SVR forecasting model that combines all input features is able to generate predictions with a similar accuracy as statistically enhanced predictions of a PV simulation model.

[1]  Paras Mandal,et al.  Forecasting Power Output of Solar Photovoltaic System Using Wavelet Transform and Artificial Intelligence Techniques , 2012, Complex Adaptive Systems.

[2]  Oliver Kramer,et al.  Statistical Learning for Short-Term Photovoltaic Power Predictions , 2016, Computational Sustainability.

[3]  Detlev Heinemann,et al.  Prediction of Solar Irradiance and Photovoltaic Power , 2012 .

[4]  E. Lorenz,et al.  Chapter 11 – Satellite-Based Irradiance and Power Forecasting for the German Energy Market , 2013 .

[5]  H. Pedro,et al.  Assessment of forecasting techniques for solar power production with no exogenous inputs , 2012 .

[6]  Wei Qiao,et al.  Short-term solar power prediction using a support vector machine , 2013 .

[7]  Adel Mellit,et al.  Artificial Intelligence technique for modelling and forecasting of solar radiation data: a review , 2008, Int. J. Artif. Intell. Soft Comput..

[8]  Oliver Kramer,et al.  Short-Term Wind Energy Forecasting Using Support Vector Regression , 2011, SOCO.

[9]  Christian Reise,et al.  SatelLight: A WWW server which provides high quality daylight and solar radiation data for Western and Central Europe , 1998 .

[10]  Trevor Hastie,et al.  The Elements of Statistical Learning , 2001 .

[11]  Hans-Georg Beyer,et al.  Irradiance Forecasting for the Power Prediction of Grid-Connected Photovoltaic Systems , 2009, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing.

[12]  Petr Musílek,et al.  Support Vector Regression of multiple predictive models of downward short-wave radiation , 2014, 2014 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN).

[13]  Ignacio J. Ramirez-Rosado,et al.  Short-Term Power Forecasting Model for Photovoltaic Plants Based on Historical Similarity , 2013 .

[14]  Detlev Heinemann,et al.  Short Term Forecasting of Solar Irradiance by Combining Satellite Data and Numerical Weather Predictions , 2012 .

[15]  José R. Dorronsoro,et al.  Support Vector Forecasting of Solar Radiation Values , 2013, HAIS.

[16]  Bangyin Liu,et al.  Online 24-h solar power forecasting based on weather type classification using artificial neural network , 2011 .

[17]  Bernhard Schölkopf,et al.  A tutorial on support vector regression , 2004, Stat. Comput..

[18]  H. Beyer,et al.  Solar energy assessment using remote sensing technologies , 2003 .

[19]  Vladimir N. Vapnik,et al.  The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory , 2000, Statistics for Engineering and Information Science.

[20]  J. Olseth,et al.  A model for the diffuse fraction of hourly global radiation , 1987 .

[21]  Marek Brabec,et al.  Statistical modeling of energy production by photovoltaic farms , 2010, 2010 IEEE Electrical Power & Energy Conference.

[22]  S. P. Lloyd,et al.  Least squares quantization in PCM , 1982, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[23]  C. Coimbra,et al.  Forecasting of global and direct solar irradiance using stochastic learning methods, ground experiments and the NWS database , 2011 .

[24]  T. M. Klucher Evaluation of models to predict insolation on tilted surfaces , 1978 .