Comparison of Statistical Production Models for a Solar and a Wind Power Plant

Abstract

Mathematical models to characterize and forecast the power production of photovoltaic and eolian plants are justified by the benefits of these sustainable energies, the increased usage in recent years, and the necessity to be integrated into the general energy system. In this paper, starting from two collections of data representing the power production hourly measured at a solar plant and a wind farm, adequate time series methods have been used to draw appropriate statistical models for their productions. The data are smoothed in both cases using moving average and continuous time series have been obtained leading to some models in good agreement with experimental data. For the solar power plant, the developed models can predict the specific power of the next day, next week, and next month, with the most accurate being the monthly model, while for wind power only a monthly model could be validated. Using the CUSUM (cumulative sum control chart) method, the analyzed data formed stationary time series with seasonality. The similar methods used for both sets of data (from the solar plant and wind farm) were analyzed and compared. When compare with other studies which propose production models starting from different measurements involving meteorological data and/or machinery characteristics, an innovative element of this paper consists in the data set on which it is based, this being the production itself. The novelty and the importance of this research reside in the simplicity and the possibility to be reproduced for other related conditions even though every new set of data (provided from other power plants) requires further investigation.