The Search for Areas with High Solar Energy Based on Clustering Analysis

Abstract

Thailand is a tropical country with high average solar power across the country. This makes Thailand a very suitable area for utilizing this kind of clean energy. However, not all areas in Thailand have high solar power all year round. This research is thus propose a cluster-based method to search for the area that produces high solar energy throughout the year. The proposed methodology is based on the clustering technique and the silhouette analysis is used to define the appropriate value of a k variable to be used in the k-means clustering algorithm. We divide the original solar energy data into several datasets on a monthly bases, that is based on the number of months. Then, intersect the grouping results to identify the areas with high solar energy throughout the year. The output of this methodology is the areas with the highest solar energy power. For the case study of Thailand, the analysis result can reveal high energy areas covering 29 provinces out of 77, which is approximately 7.52 percent of the total areas.