Abstract
Solar Irradiance depicts the light energy produced by the Sun that hits the Earth. This energy is important for renewable energy generation and is intrinsically fluctuating. Forecasting solar irradiance is crucial for efficient solar energy generation and management. Work in the literature focused on the short-term prediction of solar irradiance, using meteorological data to forecast the irradiance for the next hours, days, or weeks. Facing climate change and the continuous increase in greenhouse gas emissions, particularly from the use of fossil fuels, the reliance on renewable energy sources, such as solar energy, is expanding. Consequently, governments and practitioners are calling for efficient long-term energy generation plans, which could enable 100% renewable-based electricity systems to match energy demand. In this paper, we aim to perform the long-term prediction of daily solar irradiance, by leveraging the downscaled climate simulations of Global Circulation Models (GCMs). We propose a novel Bayesian deep learning framework, named DeepSI (denoting Deep Solar Irradiance), that employs bidirectional long short-term memory autoencoders, prefixed to a transformer, with an uncertainty quantification component based on the Monte Carlo dropout sampling technique. We use DeepSI to predict daily solar irradiance for three different locations within the United States. These locations include the Solar Star power station in California, Medford in New Jersey, and Farmers Branch in Texas. Experimental results showcase the suitability of DeepSI for predicting daily solar irradiance from the simulated climate data, its superiority over related machine learning methods, and its ability to reproduce the daily variability. We further use DeepSI with future climate simulations to produce long-term projections of daily solar irradiance, up to year 2099.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Garner R (2008) Solar irradiance. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
De Soto W, Klein S, Beckman W (2006) Improvement and validation of a model for photovoltaic array performance. Sol Energy 80:78–88
Duffie JA, Beckman WA (2013) Solar engineering of thermal processes. John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey
Alfaris F, Alzahrani A, Kimball JW (2014) Stochastic model for PV sensor array data. In: 2014 International conference on renewable energy research and application (ICRERA), pp 798–803
Hassan GE, Youssef ME, Mohamed ZE, Ali MA, Hanafy AA (2016) New temperature-based models for predicting global solar radiation. Appl Energy 179:437–450
Mellit A, Pavan AM (2010) A 24-h forecast of solar irradiance using artificial neural network: application for performance prediction of a grid-connected PV plant at Trieste, Italy. Sol Energy 84:807–821
Wang F, Mi Z, Su S, Zhao H (2012) Short-term solar irradiance forecasting model based on artificial neural network using statistical feature parameters. Energies 5:1355–1370
Yang H-T, Huang C-M, Huang Y-C, Pai Y-S (2014) A weather-based hybrid method for 1-day ahead hourly forecasting of PV power output. IEEE Trans Sustain Energy 5:917–926
Li J, Ward JK, Tong J, Collins L, Platt G (2016) Machine learning for solar irradiance forecasting of photovoltaic system. Renew Energy 90:542–553
Benali L, Notton G, Fouilloy A, Voyant C, Dizene R (2019) Solar radiation forecasting using artificial neural network and random forest methods: application to normal beam, horizontal diffuse and global components. Renew Energy 132:871–884
Jumin E, Basaruddin FB, Yusoff YB, Latif SD, Ahmed AN (2021) Solar radiation prediction using boosted decision tree regression model: a case study in Malaysia. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28:26571–26583
Abuella M, Chowdhury B (2015) Solar power probabilistic forecasting by using multiple linear regression analysis. In: SoutheastCon 2015, pp 1–5
Kumari P, Toshniwal D (2021) Long short term memory–convolutional neural network based deep hybrid approach for solar irradiance forecasting. Appl Energy 295:117061
Golam M, Akter R, Lee J-M, Kim D-S (2021) A long short-term memory-based solar irradiance prediction scheme using meteorological data. IEEE Geosci Remote Sens Lett 19:1–5
Alzahrani A, Shamsi P, Dagli C, Ferdowsi M (2017) Solar irradiance forecasting using deep neural networks. Procedia Comput Sci 114:304–313
Bae KY, Jang HS, Sung DK (2016) Hourly solar irradiance prediction based on support vector machine and its error analysis. IEEE Trans Power Syst 32:935–945
Sharma A, Kakkar A (2018) Forecasting daily global solar irradiance generation using machine learning. Renew Sustain Energy Rev 82:2254–2269
Gerges F, Boufadel MC, Bou-Zeid E, Nassif H, Wang JTL (2022) A novel deep learning approach to the statistical downscaling of temperatures for monitoring climate change. In: The 6th international conference on machine learning and soft computing. Haikou, China, pp 1–7
Gerges F, Boufadel MC, Bou-Zeid E, Nassif H, Wang JTL (2022) A novel Bayesian deep learning approach to the downscaling of wind speed with uncertainty quantification. In: Pacific-Asia conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, p 55–66
Gerges F, Boufadel MC, Bou-Zeid E, Darekar A, Nassif H, Wang JTL (2022) Bayesian multi-head convolutional neural networks with Bahdanau attention for forecasting daily precipitation in climate change monitoring. In: European conference on machine learning and principles and practice of knowledge discovery in databases
Gerges F, Boufadel MC, Bou-Zeid E, Nassif H, Wang JTL (2022) Deep learning-based downscaling of temperatures for monitoring local climate change using global climate simulation data. World Sci Annu Rev Artif Intell 1:2250001
Hüllermeier E, Waegeman W (2021) Aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty in machine learning: an introduction to concepts and methods. Mach Learn 110:457–506
Myojin T, Hashimoto S, Ishihama N (2020) Detecting uncertain BNN outputs on FPGA using Monte Carlo dropout sampling. International conference on artificial neural networks. Springer, pp 27–38
Pierce DW, Cayan DR, Thrasher BL (2014) Statistical downscaling using localized constructed analogs (LOCA). J Hydrometeorol 15:2558–2585
Hochreiter S, Schmidhuber J (1997) Long short-term memory. Neural Comput 9:1735–1780
Schuster M, Paliwal KK (1997) Bidirectional recurrent neural networks. IEEE Trans Signal Process 45:2673–2681
Kramer MA (1991) Nonlinear principal component analysis using autoassociative neural networks. AIChE J 37:233–243
Vaswani A, Shazeer N, Parmar N, Uszkoreit J, Jones L, Gomez AN, Kaiser Ł, Polosukhin I (2017) Attention is all you need. In: Advances in neural information processing systems, pp 5998–6008
Devika R, Vairavasundaram S, Mahenthar CSJ, Varadarajan V, Kotecha K (2021) A deep learning model based on BERT and sentence transformer for semantic keyphrase extraction on big social data. IEEE Access 9:165252–165261
Ikromjanov K, Bhattacharjee S, Hwang Y-B, Sumon RI, Kim H-C, Choi H-K (2022) Whole slide image analysis and detection of prostate cancer using vision transformers. In: Proceedings of the 2022 international conference on artificial intelligence in information and communication (ICAIIC), pp 399–402
Shen L, Wang Y (2022) TCCT: tightly-coupled convolutional transformer on time series forecasting. Neurocomputing
Tsironi E, Barros P, Weber C, Wermter S (2017) An analysis of convolutional long short-term memory recurrent neural networks for gesture recognition. Neurocomputing 268:76–86
Wang Y, Rocková V (2020) Uncertainty quantification for sparse deep learning. In: International conference on artificial intelligence and statistics. In: Proceedings of machine learning research (PMLR), pp 298–308
Blei DM, Kucukelbir A, McAuliffe JD (2017) Variational inference: a review for statisticians. J Am Stat Assoc 112:859–877
Gal Y, Ghahramani Z (2016) Dropout as a Bayesian approximation: representing model uncertainty in deep learning. In: 33rd International conference on machine learning. PMLR, pp 1050–1059
Jiang H, Jing J, Wang J, Liu C, Li Q, Xu Y, Wang JTL, Wang H (2021) Tracing Hα fibrils through Bayesian deep learning. Astrophys J Suppl Ser 256:20
Kwon Y, Won J-H, Kim BJ, Paik MC (2020) Uncertainty quantification using Bayesian neural networks in classification: application to biomedical image segmentation. Comput Stat Data Anal 142:106816
Kendall A, Badrinarayanan V, Cipolla R (2015) Bayesian segnet: model uncertainty in deep convolutional encoder-decoder architectures for scene understanding. arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.02680
Zhou H, Zhang S, Peng J, Zhang S, Li J, Xiong H, Zhang W (2021) Informer: beyond efficient transformer for long sequence time-series forecasting. In: Proceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelligence, pp 11106–11115
Abbasi AR, Mahmoudi MR, Arefi MM (2021) Transformer winding faults detection based on time series analysis. IEEE Trans Instrum Meas 70:1–10
Chai T, Draxler RR (2014) Root mean square error (RMSE) or mean absolute error (MAE)?–arguments against avoiding RMSE in the literature. Geosci Model Dev 7:1247–1250
Chicco D, Warrens MJ, Jurman G (2021) The coefficient of determination R-squared is more informative than SMAPE, MAE, MAPE, MSE and RMSE in regression analysis evaluation. PeerJ Comput Sci 7:e623
Smith PF, Ganesh S, Liu P (2013) A comparison of random forest regression and multiple linear regression for prediction in neuroscience. J Neurosci Methods 220:85–91
Kontokosta CE, Tull C (2017) A data-driven predictive model of city-scale energy use in buildings. Appl Energy 197:303–317
Funding
Funding for this study was provided by the Bridge Resource Program (BRP) from the New Jersey Department of Transportation.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
FG wrote the paper, gathered the data, wrote the machine learning scripts and conducted the experimentations. BF, HN and EBZ provided data and results interpretation and contributed to the development of the predictive model through environmental domain expertise. JW supervised the research, interpreted the data, contributed to the writing and to the development of predictive models.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Gerges, F., Boufadel, M.C., Bou-Zeid, E. et al. Long-term prediction of daily solar irradiance using Bayesian deep learning and climate simulation data. Knowl Inf Syst 66, 613–633 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-023-01955-x
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-023-01955-x