Short-Term Solar PV Power Generation Day-Ahead Forecasting Using Artificial Neural Network: Assessment and Validation

Solar photovoltaics (PV) is considered an auspicious key to dealing with energy catastrophes and ecological contamination. This type of renewable energy is based on climatic conditions to produce electrical power. In this article, a multilayer feedforward neural network (MLFFNN) is implemented to predict and forecast the output power for a solar PV power station. The MLFFNN is designed using the module temperature and the solar radiation as the two main only inputs, whereas the expected power is its output. Data of approximately one week (6-days) are obtained from a real PV power station in Egypt. The data of the first five days are used to train the MLFFNN. The training of the designed MLFFNN is executed using two types of learning algorithms: Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) and error backpropagation (EBP). The data of the sixth day, which are not used for the training, are used to check the efficiency and the generalization capability of the trained MLFFNN by both algorithms. The results provide evidence that the trained MLFFNN is running very well and efficiently to predict the power correctly. The results obtained from the trained MLFFNN by LM (MLFFNN-LM) are compared with the corresponding ones obtained by the MLFFNN trained by EBP (MLFFNN-EBP). From this comparison, the MLFFNN-LM has slightly lower performance in the training stage and slightly better performance in the stage of effectiveness investigation compared with the MLFFNN-EBP. Finally, a comparison with other previously published approaches is presented. Indeed, predicting the power correctly using the artificial NN is useful to avoid the fall of the power that maybe happen at any time.