Short/medium term solar power forecasting of Chhattisgarh state of India using modified TLBO optimized ELM

The solar power generation (SPG) prediction is indispensable to establish a reliable and secure power grid. The intelligent and knowledgeable techniques are required to forecast the most nonlinear and volatile SPG due to its dependency on fluctuating weather conditions (solar irradiance and temperature). In this work, an optimized Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) is employed to forecast real-time SPG of Chhattisgarh state of India by conceding weather conditions. The performance of ELM approach is enhanced by exploring relevant parameters such as weights, biases, and numbers of hidden layers. It requires computational techniques which are proficient enough to deal with high dimensional and complex problems. Teaching Learning Based Optimization (TLBO) technique is modified with two novel approaches to enhance the exploration and exploitation proficiency of TLBO algorithm. The collaboration of modified TLBO (MTLBO) and optimizable ELM technique is implemented to forecast SPG for four different case studies such as an hour ahead, a day ahead, a month ahead and three months ahead forecasting. The performance measures such as mean absolute error (MAE), mean squared error (MSE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), mean arctangent absolute percentage error (MAAPE), and correlation of determination (R2) are used to demonstrate the performance of proposed approach. Diebold-Mariano (DM) test and forecasting effectiveness are employed to hypothetically corroborate the capability of MTLBO based ELM model to outperform different optimization based ELM, ELM (with randomly fixed weights and biases) and ANN models. The simulation results contribute the evidence of excel performance of proposed approach for SPG forecasting.