Variation in solar irradiance causes power generation fluctuations in solar power plants. Power grid operators need accurate irradiance forecasts to manage this variability. Many factors affect irradiance, including the time of year, weather and time of day. Cloud cover is one of the most important variables that affects solar power generation, but is also characterized by a high degree of variability and uncertainty. Deep learning methods have the ability to learn long-term dependencies within sequential data. We investigate the application of Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) to forecast solar irradiance and present the results of applying multivariate GRU to forecast hourly solar irradiance in Phoenix, Arizona. We compare and evaluate the performance of GRU against Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) using strictly historical solar irradiance data as well as the addition of exogenous weather variables and cloud cover data. Based on our results, we found that the addition of exogenous weather variables and cloud cover data in both GRU and LSTM significantly improved forecasting accuracy, performing better than univariate and statistical models.
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Direct Normal Irradiance Forecasting Using Multivariate Gated Recurrent Units
Power grid operators rely on solar irradiance forecasts to manage uncertainty and variability associated with solar power. Meteorological factors such as cloud cover, wind direction, and wind speed affect irradiance and are associated with a high degree of variability and uncertainty. Statistical models fail to accurately capture the dependence between these factors and irradiance. In this paper, we introduce the idea of applying multivariate Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) to forecast Direct Normal Irradiance (DNI) hourly. The proposed GRU-based forecasting method is evaluated against traditional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) using historical irradiance data (i.e., weather variables that include cloud cover, wind direction, and wind speed) to forecast irradiance forecasting over intra-hour and inter-hour intervals. Our evaluation on one of the sites from Measurement and Instrumentation Data Center indicate that both GRU and LSTM improved DNI forecasting performance when evaluated under different conditions. Moreover, including wind direction and wind speed can have substantial improvement in the accuracy of DNI forecasts. Besides, the forecasting model can accurately forecast irradiance values over multiple forecasting horizons.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10185186
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Energies
- Volume:
- 13
- Issue:
- 15
- ISSN:
- 1996-1073
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 3914
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3390/en13153914
