2D-interval forecasts for solar power production

Accurate prediction of the power generated from solar energy is required for the successful integration of solar energy into the power grid. In this paper we consider forecasting the electricity power produced by a photovoltaic solar system. While previous research has been concerned with point forecasts, we focus on interval forecasts which are more suitable for the highly variable nature of the solar data. We consider a special type of interval forecasts, called 2D-interval forecasts, where the goal is to predict a range of expected values for the solar power output, for a future time interval. We present a new approach called SVR2D which directly computes the 2D-interval forecasts from previous historical solar power and meteorological data, using support vector regression as a prediction algorithm. We evaluate its performance using Australian photovoltaic data for two years sampled every 1, 5 and 30 min, for various interval lengths. The results show that SVR2D provides accurate predictions, outperforming a number of baselines and other methods used for comparison. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.