Prediction of solar energy guided by pearson correlation using machine learning

Abstract Solar energy forecasting represents a key element in increasing the competitiveness of solar power plants in the energy market and reducing the dependence on fossil fuels in economic and social development. This paper presents an approach for predicting solar energy, based on machine and deep learning techniques. The relevance of the studied models was evaluated for real-time and short-term solar energy forecasting to ensure optimized management and security requirements in this field while using an integral solution based on a single tool and an appropriate predictive model. The datasets we used in this study, represent data from 2016 to 2018 and are related to Errachidia which is a semi-desert climate province in Morocco. Pearson correlation coefficient was deployed to identify the most relevant meteorological inputs from which the models should learn. RF and ANN have provided high accuracies against LR and SVR, which have reported very significant errors. ANN has shown good performance for both real-time and short-term predictions. The key findings were compared with Pirapora in Brazil, which is a tropical climate region, to show the quality and reproducibility of the study.