Long Term Solar Power Generation Prediction using Adaboost as a Hybrid of Linear and Non-linear Machine Learning Model

Abstract

The usage of renewable energy sources has increased manifolds in terms of electric utilities. From other non-conventional sources, solar energy has been seen as a promising and convenient source used around the globe. In terms of meeting the daily requirements, solar energy has huge potential to fulfil the world's demand. However, firstly the characteristic of solar energy is very unpredictable and intermittent due to variation of weather. Secondly, the optimization and the planning of smart grid effect the operation of PV system. Thus, prediction on the long horizon is needed to address this problem. Nevertheless, long term forecasting of solar power generation is deliberated as a challenging problem. Therefore, this paper proposes a 10 day ahead solar power forecasting using combination of linear and non-linear machine learning models. At first, the outputs are generated from Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Autoregressive with exogenous variable (ARX). Later on, these three outputs are combined and are made as a strong classifier with the Adaptive boost (Adaboost) algorithm. The simulations were conducted on the data obtained from real PV plant. By the experimental results and discussion, it was endogenously concluded that the combination of all techniques with the Adaboost have increased the performances and showing the high accuracy as compare to the individual machine learning models. The hybrid Adaboost shows %MAPE 8.88, which proven high accuracy. While on the other hand, for the individual technique, RNN shows 10.88, SVM reveals 11.78 and ARX gives 13.00 of percentage MAPE. The improvement proves that combination of techniques performs better than individual models and proclaims the high accuracy.