Methodology based on data science for the development of a forecast of the ower generation of a photovoltaic solar plant

Abstract

The use of photovoltaic solar plants for the generation of electrical energy has been constantly increasing in recent years, and many of these plants are connected to the external electrical network, which makes it necessary to forecast the electrical energy generated by the solar plants to assist in the management of the network operator. This research presents a methodology based on data science to develop the forecast of electrical energy generated from photovoltaic solar plants, using three different techniques for comparison purposes: time series analysis, multiple linear regres-sion, and artificial neural network. Historical data of peak power, solar irradiance, ambient temperature, wind speed, and soiling rate from an experimental NREL photovoltaic solar plant were used. To evaluate the performance of the models, the RMSE, MAE, and MAPE metrics are used, resulting in the ARIMA model of the time series analysis having the best performance with a MAE of 1.38 kWh, RMSE of 1.40 kWh, and MAPE of 6.35%. In the correlation anal-ysis, it was determined that power generation was independent of the soiling rate, so this variable was discarded in the regression models.