Solar Irradiance Forecasting Using a Data-Driven Algorithm and Contextual Optimisation

Solar forecasting plays a key part in the renewable energy transition. Major challenges, related to load balancing and grid stability, emerge when a high percentage of energy is provided by renewables. These can be tackled by new energy management strategies guided by power forecasts. This paper presents a data-driven and contextual optimisation forecasting (DCF) algorithm for solar irradiance that was comprehensively validated using short- and long-term predictions, in three US cities: Denver, Boston, and Seattle. Moreover, step-by-step implementation guidelines to follow and reproduce the results were proposed. Initially, a comparative study of two machine learning (ML) algorithms, the support vector machine (SVM) and Facebook Prophet (FBP) for solar prediction was conducted. The short-term SVM outperformed the FBP model for the 1- and 2- hour prediction, achieving a coefficient of determination (R2) of 91.2% in Boston. However, FBP displayed sustained performance for increasing the forecast horizon and yielded better results for 3-hour and long-term forecasts. The algorithms were optimised by further contextual model adjustments which resulted in substantially improved performance. Thus, DCF utilised SVM for short-term and FBP for long-term predictions and optimised their performance using contextual information. DCF achieved consistent performance for the three cities and for long- and short-term predictions, with an average R2 of 85%.