Multi-horizon solar radiation forecasting for Mediterranean locations using time series models

Considering the grid manager's point of view,needsin terms ofprediction of intermittent energy like thephotovoltaic resourcecan be distinguishedaccording to theconsideredhorizon: following days (d+1, d+2 and d+3), next day by hourly step (h+24), next hour (h+1) and next few minutes (m+5 e.g.). Through this work, we haveidentified methodologies using time series modelsfor thepredictionhorizonof global radiationand photovoltaic power. What wepresent here isa comparison of differentpredictorsdeveloped and testedtoproposea hierarchy.For horizons d+1 and h+1, without advanced ad hoc time series pre-processing (stationarity) we find it is not easy to differentiate between autoregressive moving average (ARMA) and multilayer perceptron (MLP). However we observed that using exogenous variables improves significantly the results for MLP . We have shown that the MLP were more adapted for horizons h+24 and m+5. In summary, our results are complementary and improve the existing prediction techniques with innovative tools: stationarity, numerical weather prediction combination, MLP and ARMA hybridization, multivariate analysis, time index, etc.