Deep Learning-Based Image Regression for Short-Term Solar Irradiance Forecasting on the Edge

Abstract

Photovoltaic (PV) power production is characterized by high variability due to short-term meteorological effects such as cloud movements. These effects have a significant impact on the incident solar irradiance in PV parks. In order to control PV park performance, researchers have focused on Computer Vision and Deep Learning approaches to perform short-term irradiance forecasting using sky images. Motivated by the task of improving PV park control, the current work introduces the Image Regression Module, which produces irradiance values from sky images using image processing methods and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). With the objective of enhancing the performance of CNN models on the task of irradiance estimation and forecasting, we propose an image processing method based on sun localization. Our findings show that the proposed method can consistently improve the accuracy of irradiance values produced by all the CNN models of our study, reducing the Root Mean Square Error by up to 10.44 W/m2 for the MobileNetV2 model. These findings indicate that future applications which utilize CNNs for irradiance forecasting should identify the position of the sun in the image in order to produce more accurate irradiance values. Moreover, the integration of the proposed models on an edge-oriented Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) towards a smart PV park for the real-time control of PV production emphasizes their advantages.