Time series forecasting of solar power generation for large-scale photovoltaic plants

Accurate solar power forecasting is essential for grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) systems especially in case of fluctuating environmental conditions. The prediction of PV power output is critical to secure grid operation, scheduling and grid energy management. One of the key elements in PV output prediction is time series analysis especially in locations where the historical solar radiation measurements or other weather parameters have not been recorded. In this work, several time series prediction methods including the statistical methods and those based on artificial intelligence are introduced and compared rigorously for PV power output prediction. Moreover, the effect of prediction time horizon variation for all the algorithms is investigated. Hourly solar power forecasting is carried out to verify the effectiveness of different models. The data utilized in the current work comprises 3640 h of operation data taken from a 20 MW grid-connected PV station in China.