The unpredictability of intermittent renewable energy (RE) sources (solar and wind) constitutes reliability challenges for utilities whose goal is to match electricity supply to consumer demands across centralized grid networks. Thus, balancing the variable and increasing power inputs from plants with intermittent energy sources becomes a fundamental issue for transmission system operators. As a result, forecasting techniques have obtained paramount importance. This work aims at exploiting the simplicity, fast computational and good generalization capability of Extreme Learning Machines (ELMs) in providing accurate 24 h-ahead solar photovoltaic (PV) power production predictions. The ELM architecture is firstly optimized, e.g., in terms of number of hidden neurons, and number of historical solar radiations and ambient temperatures (embedding dimension) required for training the ELM model, then it is used online to predict the solar PV power productions. The investigated ELM model is applied to a real case study of 264 kWp solar PV system installed on the roof of the Faculty of Engineering at the Applied Science Private University (ASU), Amman, Jordan. Results showed the capability of the ELM model in providing predictions that are slightly more accurate with negligible computational efforts compared to a Back Propagation Artificial Neural Network (BP-ANN) model, which is currently adopted by the PV system owners for the prediction task.

In this paper, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are used to study the correlations between solar irradiance and solar photovoltaic (PV) output power which can be used for the development of a real-time prediction model to predict the next day produced power. Solar irradiance records were measured by ASU weather station located on the campus of Applied Science Private University (ASU), Amman, Jordan and the solar PV power outputs were extracted from the installed 264KWp power plant at the university. Intensive training experiments were carried out on 19249 records of data to find the optimum NN configurations and the testing results show excellent overall performance in the prediction of next 24 hours output power in KW reaching a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) value of 0.0721. This research shows that machine learning algorithms hold some promise for the prediction of power production based on various weather conditions and measures which help in the management of energy flows and the optimisation of integrating PV plants into power systems.

The capability of accurately predicting the Solar Photovoltaic (PV) power productions is crucial to effectively control and manage the electrical grid. In this regard, the objective of this work is to propose an efficient Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model in which 10 different learning algorithms (i.e., different in the way in which the adjustment on the ANN internal parameters is formulated to effectively map the inputs to the outputs) and 23 different training datasets (i.e., different combinations of the real-time weather variables and the PV power production data) are investigated for accurate 1 day-ahead power production predictions with short computational time. In particular, the correlations between different combinations of the historical wind speed, ambient temperature, global solar radiation, PV power productions, and the time stamp of the year are examined for developing an efficient solar PV power production prediction model. The investigation is carried out on a 231 kW ac grid-connected solar PV system located in Jordan. An ANN that receives in input the whole historical weather variables and PV power productions, and the time stamp of the year accompanied with Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) learning algorithm is found to provide the most accurate predictions with less computational efforts. Specifically, an enhancement reaches up to 15, 1, and 5% for the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and Coefficient of Determination (R 2) performance metrics, respectively, compared to the Persistence prediction model of literature.

One of the main parameters that affect the solar cell performance is cell temperature; the solar cell output decreases with the increase of temperature. Therefore, it is important to select the proper solar cell technology that performs better at a specified location considering its average temperatures. In addition, the solar cell performance is directly reflected on the overall economics of the project. This paper is proposed to evaluate the variations in the performance of different solar cell technologies related to the temperature in Amman, Jordan. Field data of weather station and three PV systems (Poly-crystalline, Mono-crystalline and Thin-film

In this paper, we propose a fully automated machine learning based forecasting system, called Photovoltaic Power Forecasting (PVPF) tool, that applies optimised neural networks algorithms to real-time weather data to provide 24 hours ahead forecasts for the power production of solar photovoltaic systems installed within the same region. This system imports the real-time temperature and global solar irradiance records from the ASU weather station and associates these records with the available solar PV production measurements to provide the proper inputs for the pre-trained machine learning system along with the records' time with respect to the current year. The machine learning system was pre-trained and optimised based on the Bayesian Regularization (BR) algorithm, as described in our previous research, and used to predict the solar power PV production for the next 24 hours using weather data of the last five consecutive days. Hourly predictions are provided as a power/time curve and published in real-time at the website of the renewable energy center (REC) of Applied Science Private University (ASU). It is believed that the forecasts provided by the PVPF tool can be helpful for energy management and control systems and will be used widely for the future research activities at REC.

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