Solar Irradiation Prediction Hybrid Framework Using Regularized Convolutional BiLSTM-Based Autoencoder Approach

Abstract

Solar irradiance prediction is an essential subject in renewable energy generation. Prediction enhances the planning and management of solar installations and provides several economic benefits to energy companies. Solar irradiation, being highly volatile and unpredictable makes the forecasting task complex and difficult. To address the shortcomings of the traditional approaches, this research developed a hybrid resilient architecture for an enhanced solar irradiation forecast by employing a long short-term memory (LSTM) autoencoder, convolutional neural network (CNN), and the Bi-directional Long Short Term Memory (BiLSTM) model with grid search optimization. The suggested hybrid technique is comprised of two parts: feature encoding and dimensionality reduction using an LSTM autoencoder, followed by a regularized convolutional BiLSTM. The encoder is tasked with extracting the key features in order to deduce the input into a compact latent representation. The decoder network then predicts solar irradiance by analyzing the encoded representation's attributes. The experiments are conducted on three publicly available data sets collected from Desert Knowledge Australia Solar Centre (DKASC), National Solar Radiation Database (NSRDB), and Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) Habitat. The analysis of univariate and multivariate-multi step ahead forecasting performed independently and it is compared with the conventional approaches. Several benchmark forecasting models and three performance metrics are utilized to validate the hybrid approach's prediction performance. The results show that the proposed architecture outperforms benchmark models in accuracy. © 2013 IEEE.