Time Series Forecasting for Energy Production in Stand-Alone and Tracking Photovoltaic Systems Based on Historical Measurement Data

This article presents a time series analysis for predicting energy production in photovoltaic (PV) power plant systems, namely fixed and solar-tracking ones, which were located in the north-east of Poland. The purpose of one-day forecasts is to determine the effectiveness of preventive actions and manage power systems effectively. The impact of climate variables affecting the production of electricity in the photovoltaic systems was analyzed. Forecasting models based on traditional machine learning (ML) techniques and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) neural networks were created without using solar irradiance as an input feature to the model. In addition, a few metrics were selected to determine the quality of the forecasts. The preparation of the dataset for constructing the forecasting models was discussed, and some ways for improving the metrics were given. Furthermore, comparative analyses were performed, which showed that the MLP neural networks used in the regression problem provided better results than the MLP classifier models. The Diebold–Mariano (DM) test was applied in this study to distinguish the significant differences in the forecasting accuracy between the individual models. Compared to KNN (k-nearest neighbors) or ARIMA models, the best results were obtained for the simple linear regression, MLPRegressor, and CatBoostRegressor models in each of the investigated photovoltaic systems. The R-squared value for the MLPRegressor model was around 0.6, and it exceeded 0.8 when the dataset was split and separated into months.