Day-Ahead Solar Irradiance Forecasting Using Hybrid Recurrent Neural Network with Weather Classification for Power System Scheduling
Rehman Zafar, Ba Hau Vu, Munir Husein, Il‐Yop Chung
Abstract
At the present time, power-system planning and management is facing the major challenge of integrating renewable energy resources (RESs) due to their intermittent nature. To address this problem, a highly accurate renewable energy generation forecasting system is needed for day-ahead power generation scheduling. Day-ahead solar irradiance (SI) forecasting has various applications for system operators and market agents such as unit commitment, reserve management, and biding in the day-ahead market. To this end, a hybrid recurrent neural network is presented herein that uses the long short-term memory recurrent neural network (LSTM-RNN) approach to forecast day-ahead SI. In this approach, k-means clustering is first used to classify each day as either sunny or cloudy. Then, LSTM-RNN is used to learn the uncertainty and variability for each type of cluster separately to predict the SI with better accuracy. The exogenous features such as the dry-bulb temperature, dew point temperature, and relative humidity are used to train the models. Results show that the proposed hybrid model has performed better than a feed-forward neural network (FFNN), a support vector machine (SVM), a conventional LSTM-RNN, and a persistence model.