PAOFCDN: A novel method for predictive analysis of solar irradiance

Solar photovoltaic power is the most feasible Renewable Energy Source (RES) for Pakistan, due to ample sunlight availability throughout the year. Since solar photovoltaic power is primarily dependent on solar irradiance, forecasting of solar irradiance is essential for reliable, secure and effective incorporation of solar photovoltaic power in power systems. Considering the importance of solar irradiance forecasting, in this study, predictive analysis of Islamabad’s solar irradiance is performed by using a novel proposed model named as Pelican Algorithm-based Optimized Fully-Connected Deep Network (PAOFCDN). The initial weights of Fully-Connected Deep Network (FCDN) are optimized through an effective optimization technique known as Pelican optimization. The accuracy of the optimized network PAOFCDN is enhanced many fold as compared to the FCDN network trained with randomly initialized weights. The inherent issue of poor generalization in FCDN is also resolved by optimization. The superior performance of PAOFCDN is evident from its comparative evaluation with existing benchmark methods, i.e., Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Support Vector Regression (SVR), Least Square Boosting (LSBoost) and standard FCDN. PAOFCDN achieves the least Normalized Root Mean Square Error (NRMSE) of 0.0503 as compared to 0.1179 of LSTM, 0.1256 of FCDN, and 0.2992 of SVR and LSBoost. The proposed model is applied to three real-world solar irradiance datasets having different resolutions of 10-minutes, hourly and daily. This study took the initiative of performing predictions on three datasets having multiple resolutions in perspective of south asia.