Hourly global solar irradiation forecasting for New Zealand

摘要

With the growing use of solar thermal energy systems and small scale photovoltaic power generation by domestic users, there is increasing need to develop intelligent controllers that allow these users to efficiently manage the energy generated by these systems. Ideally these intelligent controllers will be able to forecast the availability and magnitude of the solar resource to plan in advance for periods when the solar irradiance magnitude is small or unavailable. In addition, the method used to provide this forecast needs to be adaptable to a range of timescales and locations. With this in mind, this study examined the possibility of providing a 24-h ahead forecast of hourly global solar irradiation in New Zealand using several approaches but with particular reference to nonlinear autoregressive recurrent neural networks with exogenous inputs (NARX).