Principal Component Analysis and Artificial Intelligence Approaches for Solar Photovoltaic Power Forecasting

In recent years, renewable energy sources have experienced remarkable growth. However, their spatial and temporal diversity makes their large-scale integration into the current power grids difficult, as the balance between the electricity output and the consumption must be maintained at all times. Therefore, it is important to focus on the resources forecast to enhance the integration of renewable energy sources, such as solar in this study. In this article, a comparative analysis of two main machine learning methods was conducted for the prediction of the hourly photovoltaic output power. Furthermore, since various factors, such as climate variables, can impact the solar photovoltaic power and complicate the prediction process, the principal component analysis was employed to investigate the interactions between the multiple predictors and minimize the dimensionality of the datasets. The prevalent factors were then used in the predictive models as inputs. This field research is very crucial because the higher the prediction accuracy, the greater the profit for energy dealers and the lower the costs for customers.