Weather-Based Solar Energy Prediction

Photovoltaic solar panels are effective energy sources during periods of bright sunlight. Excess energy can be stored for later use at night or on cloudy days. The decision to use the stored energy now or later depends largely on being able to predict the weather on different timescales. Short term prediction of stored energy is challenging due to the non-trivial I-V characteristic of the solar cell. The erratic nature of the weather makes long term predictive energy management difficult. In this paper, we address these issues based on data collected from a solar panel, as well as its relationship to observations made of the weather. We observe that prediction, based on fuzzy decision trees, reduces the energy error by 22% compared to a constant prediction equal to the average on the studied period. Thus, exploiting the fuzzy classification provided by a fuzzy decision tree is a good improvement compared to the baseline.