K-means clustering based photo voltaic power forecasting using artificial neural network, particle swarm optimization and support vector regression

摘要

With the increasing global warming and enormous pollution, it is very obvious to generate power from renewable energy sources. In fact, photo voltaic (PV) power is a main renewable energy source for sustainable power generation. But PV power generation is uncertain and intermittent in nature. Stable and reliable power supply may not be feasible with PV power. Power supply reliability is important as much as its availability. To handle the inconsistency of PV power generation, power sector is highly dependent on forecasting methods and techniques. In this paper the feed forward neural network (FFNN) of artificial neural networks(ANN) with optimization technique particle swarm optimization (PSO) and support vector regression (SVR) are used in short term PV power generation forecasting and their performance is compared with the error calculation in terms of the mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean squared error (RMSE). The PV power and meteorological data of solar irradiation and temperature of Kolkata region of India was used for forecasting. Similar days of the year sunny days, cloudy days and rainy days are clustered using k-means clustering technique. Thereafter, a feed forward neural network is implemented to forecast a day head PV power and week ahead photo voltaic power. PSO is used to optimize the weights of the neural network. The performance of the proposed forecasting method is compared to a data mining approach, support vector regression (SVR).In this paper, the significance of proper selection of input parameters in PV power forecasting is emphasized. With the application of K-means clustering, the accuracy of ANN-PSO approach is improved significantly in a day ahead PV power forecasting and a week ahead PV power forecasting with a good margin.Even the accuracy of ANN-PSO approach after K-means clustering is better than SVR model in a week ahead forecasting.