Deep learning models for solar irradiance forecasting: A comprehensive review

The growing human population in this modern society hugely depends on the energy to fulfill their day-to-day needs and activities. Renewable energy sources, especially solar energy, can satisfy the global power demand while reducing global warming caused by conventional sources. Solar irradiance is an essential component in solar power applications. The availability of solar irradiance is influenced by several factors, such as forecasting horizon, weather classification, and performance evaluation metrics, which also need consideration. The accurate forecasting of solar irradiance is of utmost importance for the power system designers and grid operators for efficient management of solar energy systems. The intermittent and non-stationary nature of solar irradiance makes many existing statistical and machine learning approaches less competent in providing accurate predictions. In this context, deep learning models have been proposed by several researchers to reduce the limitations of existing machine learning models and improve prediction accuracy. In this work, an extensive and comprehensive review of deep learning-based solar irradiance forecasting models is presented. The effectiveness and efficacy of several deep learning models, including long short-term memory, deep belief network, echo state network, convolution neural network, etc. have been reviewed. The results obtained in the reported studies proved the superiority of deep learning models in solar forecasting applications. Few researchers have proposed deep hybrid models to improve the prediction performance further. A study reported that the hybrid of CNN-LSTM can enhance the prediction accuracy by 3.62%, 25.29%, 34.66%, 37.37% and 26.20% over CNN, LSTM, GRU, RNN and DNN, respectively. Overall, this paper offers preliminary guidelines for a detailed view of deep learning techniques that researchers and engineers can use to improve the solar photovoltaic plant's modeling and planning.

Automated summary

This paper presents a comprehensive review of deep learning-based solar irradiance forecasting models, evaluating the effectiveness and efficacy of various deep learning models, and proposing deep hybrid models to further enhance prediction performance.