Impact of Stationarizing Solar Inputs on Very-Short-Term Spatio-Temporal Global Horizontal Irradiance (GHI) Forecasting

Abstract

In solar forecasting, it is common practice for solar data (be it irradiance or photovoltaic power) to be converted into a stationary index (e.g., clear-sky or clearness index) before being used as inputs for solar-forecasting models. However, its actual impact is rarely quantified. Thus, this paper aims to study the impact of including this processing step in the modeling workflow within the scope of very-short-term spatio-temporal forecasting. Several forecasting models are considered, and the observed impact is shown to be model-dependent. Persistence does not benefit from this for such short timescales; however, the statistical models achieve an additional 0.5 to 2.5 percentual points (PPs) in terms of the forecasting skill. Machine-learning (ML) models achieve 0.9 to 1.9 more PPs compared to a linear regression, indicating that stationarization reveals non-linear patterns in the data. The exception is Random Forest, which underperforms in comparison with the other models. Lastly, the inclusion of solar elevation and azimuth angles as inputs is tested since these are easy to compute and can inform the model on time-dependent patterns. Only the cases where the input is not made stationary, or the underperforming Random Forest model, seem to benefit from this. This indicates that the apparent Sun position data can compensate for the lack of stationarization in the solar inputs and can help the models to differentiate the daily and seasonal variability from the shorter-term, weather-driven variability.