A Long Short-Term Memory-Based Solar Irradiance Prediction Scheme Using Meteorological Data

Solar irradiance prediction is an indispensable area of the photovoltaic (PV) power management system. However, PV management may be subject to severe penalties due to the unsteadiness pattern of PV output power that depends on solar radiation. A high-precision long short-term memory (LSTM)-based neural network model named SIPNet to predict solar irradiance in a short time interval is proposed to overcome this problem. Solar radiation depends on the environmental sensing of meteorological information such as temperature, pressure, humidity, wind speed, and direction, which are different dimensions in measurement. LSTM neural network can concurrently learn the spatiotemporal of multivariate input features via various logistic gates. Moreover, SIPNet can estimate the future solar irradiance given the historical observation of the meteorological information and the radiation data. The SIPNet model is simulated and compared with the actual and predicted data series and evaluated by the mean absolute error (MAE), mean square error (MSE), and root MSE. The empirical results show that the value of MAE, MSE, and root mean square error of SIPNet is 0.0413, 0.0033, and 0.057, respectively, which demonstrate the effectiveness of SIPNet and outperforms other existing models.