Novel Multi-Time Scale Deep Learning Algorithm for Solar Irradiance Forecasting

Solar irradiance forecasting is an inevitable and most significant process in grid-connected photovoltaic systems. Solar power is highly non-linear, and thus to manage the grid operation efficiently, with irradiance forecasting for various timescales, such as an hour ahead, a day ahead, and a week ahead, strategies are developed and analysed in this article. However, the single time scale model can perform better for that specific time scale but cannot be employed for other time scale forecasting. Moreover, the data consideration for single time scale forecasting is limited. In this work, a multi-time scale model for solar irradiance forecasting is proposed based on the multi-task learning algorithm. An effective resource sharing scheme between each task is presented. The proposed multi-task learning algorithm is implemented with a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network model and the performance is investigated for various time scale forecasting. The hyperparameter estimation of the proposed LSTM model is made by a hybrid chicken swarm optimizer based on combining the best features of both the chicken swarm optimization algorithm (CSO) and grey wolf optimization (GWO) algorithm. The proposed model is validated, comparing existing methodologies for single timescale forecasting, and the proposed strategy demonstrated highly consistent performance for all time scale forecasting with improved metric results.