Solar Irradiance Prediction Using Optimized Nonlinear Autoregressive Exogenous

(NARX)-Coupled Deep Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Network Model

1. Introduction

Renewable energy sources (RESs) are seen as a more environmentally friendly and sustainable
alternative to fossil fuels. Better use of renewable energy can result in decreased greenhouse
gas emissions, financial savings, increased reliability and scalability, greater energy security,
and a more diverse energy mix [1]. Solar forecasting essentially has two parts, first is the
forecasting of the weather variables like solar irradiation, wind speed, temperature etc. and the
second is the prediction of the final power output or efficiency of a photo-voltaic panel. There
are mainly two measurements of solar irradiation, the direct normal irradiation (DNI) measures
the irradiation coming from sun in a straight line, and direct horizontal irradiation (DHI)
accounts to the irradiation due to scattering coming from other directions. Together they are
measured by global horizontal irradiation (GHI), the amount of energy received at unit surface
area. Forecasting GHI is divided into short-term and long-term forecasting according to the
lead time. Short-term forecast predicts the irradiation from an hour ahead to a week ahead while
long-term forecast generally tries to predict seasonal effects on the irradiation. While the short-
term forecasting is important for utility management, long-term forecasting is more relevant
for revenue generation and financial planning [6]. Increased consumption of energy has direct
effect on environment which in turn affects the economic development. Energy is available in
different forms in the universe. These various forms of energy are related and can be
transformed from one form to another. Hence, energy cannot be destroyed, it can only be
converted to other forms only. Presently, fossil fuels are used to generate electrical energy in
most of the countries of the world. But this form of energy is expensive, exhaustive, non-
renewable and day by day decreasing [8].
Solar irradiation forecasters can be described in terms of two primary dimensions: the first
relies on the forecaster’s prediction horizon and the second is based on the model that is used
to develop the forecaster. The prediction horizon dimension contains four types of forecasters
[10] very short-term forecasters, whose predictions are made for next few minutes and are
involved in Realtime dispatch [11,12] short-term forecasters, whose predictions are made from
a few hours ahead up to a day ahead and where the predicted values are involved in unit-
commitment or economic dispatch [13,14] medium-term forecasters, whose predictions are
made over a range from a day to a few weeks, and the predicted values are used in maintenance
planning [15] and long-term forecasters, whose predictions are made for a range from a few
weeks to months ahead and where the predicted values are used to power assessment and
examine the necessity of new power infrastructures [16,17][3]. In order to enhance the accuracy
of short-term solar irradiation predictions, incorporating the spatial correlation between solar
irradiation and other meteorological variables can be advantageous. For example, historical
solar irradiance from neighbouring sites tends to show a high correlation with solar irradiance
at the target sites. However, due to the high computational cost, the incorporation of large
amounts of data is often challenging [18][2].
Photovoltaic output power depends on many factors; such as sun position, weather conditions,
module temperature, thermal characteristics, module material composition and mounting
structure (Ayomp, 2010). Real time power generation should be investigated precisely for grid
performance, because a high penetration of PV production could create instability in the grid
(McCollum et al., 2018) [8]. Solar photovoltaic systems collect energy from the sun in a spatial
dimension [19]. Therefore, it is important to understand the amount of variability of solar
irradiance in the area with solar power systems. Variable Renewable Energy (VRE) adaptation
capability of the electricity network depends on the amount of variability of the output power
of the Solar Photovoltaic (SPV) plant. The movement of the cloud creates shadows on the
Photovoltaic (PV) modules and changes the incidence of solar irradiance [20]. The output of
the PV system varies accordingly and provides a great effect on the integrated electric system
[21][9]. Therefore, the integration of more renewable generators will increase the traditional
grid’s uncertainty level due to these generators’ dependency on intermittent meteorological
parameters. In order to continue adding renewable generators in traditional networks, main grid
operators have started asking that the operating requirements for renewable resources be
increased in order to make them as reliable as conventional generators in the medium-term. For
instance, an option to improve the reliability of renewable generators consists of increasing the
accuracy of the prediction [3].

2. Literature review

Author Method Advantage Disadvantage

Md Shafiul Alam et Ensemble Machine- Attain high accuracy Use of a
al., [1] Learning Model and robustness. computationally
expensive algorithm.
Yongqi Liu et al., Ensemble provides an Increased storage
[2] spatiotemporal deep effective uncertainty
learning model estimation for the
prediction
Fermin Rodriguez et Ensemble of easy to program and Training time
al., [3] machine learning train more quickly required is much
and spatiotemporal higher.
parameters
Kada Bouchouicha K-fold cross- optimizing the error Sensitivity to Input
et al., [4] validation method estimates and Parameters.
stabilizing the
performances
Bhaskar Pratim Deep learning model Improves the Long training times
Mukhoty et al., [5] prediction accuracy especially when
working with vast
amounts of historical
solar irradiation
data.
Yuan Gaoa et al., [6] Deep generative It can avoid the lacking
model based on problem of error interpretability and
LSTM accumulation transparency.
Md. Bengir Ahmed solar irradiation High percent of solar panels may
Shuvho et al., [7] predict model based accuracy experience
on fuzzy logic and degradation and
artificial neural efficiency losses due
networks to factors such as
dust accumulation,
soiling, shading, and
aging.
N. Yogambal long short-term Highly consistent local stagnation
Jayalakshmi et al., memory (LSTM) performance for all issues, global
[8] neural network time scale stagnation issues and
model forecasting delayed convergence
3. Objectives

• To design and develop the deep model for the solar irradiance prediction.
• To develop a novel optimization algorithm for the effective tuning of the classifier and
boosts the performance.
• To prove the efficiency of the model by comparing with previous existing methods.

4. Challenges

• Large-scale renewable energy grid integration has many challenges including reduced
reliability due to intermittency, less grid inertia, high fault current, and reduction in grid
stability.
• A major challenge in spatiotemporal forecasting modelling is to handle the
dimensionality issues raised by the large number of both input and output variables
• Changes in atmospheric composition, aerosol load, and cloud cover patterns due to
climate change can alter solar radiation levels and distribution.
• Predicting solar irradiation accurately at high temporal resolutions, such as intra-hour
or sub-hourly intervals, is challenging.
• The incorporation of large amounts of data is often challenging due to the high
computational cost

5. Methodology

The aim of the research will be to design and develop the deep model for the solar irradiance
prediction, which will support the real-time grid-based applications. For implementing this
model and for ensuring the better prediction accuracy, dataset will be acquired from
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/dronio/SolarEnergy , which includes the information of
environment temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction for predicting the solar
irradiance. Thus, the dataset will be the input, which will be fed to the designed deep learning
model for solar irradiance prediction. The model will be based on the Optimized Nonlinear
autoregressive exogenous (NARX)-coupled deep bidirectional long short-term memory
network (deep BiLSTM) model that will be trained using the nature-inspired characters
reflecting the trickery nature of the wolf-fox-eagle [22][23][24]. Thus, the analysis through the
deep optimizer network will render an improved performance in the solar irradiance prediction.
Further, the objective function will be designed based on the prediction accuracy. The model
will be implemented in PYTHON through the performance metrics, such as accuracy,
precision, and recall. Moreover, the comparative analysis of the proposed model will be
performed with respect to the existing models in order to highlight the achievements of the
developed method in the prediction.
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