Development and Comparison of Two Novel Hybrid Neural Network Models for Hourly Solar Radiation Prediction

There are a lot of developing countries with inadequate meteorological stations to measure solar radiation. This has been a major drawback for solar power applications in these countries as the performance of the solar-powered system cannot be accurately forecasted. In this study, two novel hybrid neural networks namely; convolutional neural network/artificial neural network (CNN-ANN) and convolutional neural network/long short-term memory/artificial neural network (CNN-LSTM-ANN), have been developed for hourly global solar radiation prediction. ANN models are also developed and the performance of the hybrid neural network models is compared with it. This study contributes to the search for more accurate solar radiation estimation methods. The hybrid neural network models are trained/tested with data from ten different countries across Africa. Results from this study indicate that the performance of all the hybrid models developed in this study is superior to what has been presented in existing literature with their r values ranging from 0.9662 to 0.9930. CNN-ANN model is the best for solar radiation forecasting in Southern, Central, and West Africa. CNN-LSTM-ANN is better for East Africa while both CNN-ANN and CNN-LSTM-ANN are suitable for North Africa. CNN-ANN application for solar radiation prediction in Chad had the overall best performance with an r-value, MAE, RMSE, and MAPE of 0.9930, 15.70 W/m(2), 46.84 W/m(2), and 4.98% respectively. The integration of CNN and LSTM algorithms with an ANN model enhanced long-term computational dependency and reduce error terms for the model.

Automated summary

This study develops two novel hybrid neural network models for accurate prediction of global solar radiation. Compared with traditional artificial neural network models, the hybrid models show better performance in different countries across Africa. The results of this study are of great significance for finding more accurate methods of solar radiation estimation.