Optimal artificial neural network configurations for hourly solar irradiation estimation

Solar energy is widely used in order to generate clean electric energy. However, due to its intermittent nature, this resource is only inserted in a limited way within the electrical networks. To increase the share of solar energy in the energy balance and allow better management of its production, it is necessary to know precisely the available solar potential at a fine time step to take into account all these stochastic variations. In this paper, a comparison between different artificial neural network (ANN) configurations is elaborated to estimate the hourly solar irradiation. An investigation of the optimal neurons and layers is investigated. To this end, feedforward neural network, cascade forward neural network and fitting neural network have been applied for this purpose. In this context, we have used different meteorological parameters to estimate the hourly global solar irirradiation in the region of Laghouat, Algeria. The validation process shows that choosing the cascade forward neural network two inputs gives an R2 value equal to 97.24% and an normalized root mean square error (NRMSE) equals to 0.1678 compared to the results of three inputs, which gives an R2 value equaled to 95.54% and an NRMSE equals to 0.2252. The comparison between different existing methods in literature show the goodness of the proposed models.