Power production prediction from Renewable Energy (RE) sources has been widely studied in the last decade. This is extremely important for utilities to counterpart electricity supply with consumer demands across centralized grid networks. In this context, we propose a local training strategy-based Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for predicting the power productions of solar Photovoltaic (PV) systems. Specifically, the timestamp, weather variables, and corresponding power productions collected locally at each hour interval h, h=[1,24] (i.e., an interval of ∆ℎ=1 hour), are exploited to build, optimize, and evaluate H=24 different ANNs for the 24 hourly solar PV production predictions. The proposed local training strategy-based ANN is expected to provide more accurate predictions with short computational times than those obtained by a single (i.e., H=1) ANN model (hereafter called benchmark) built, optimized, and evaluated globally on the entire available dataset. The proposed strategy is applied to a case study regarding a 264kWp solar PV system located in Amman, Jordan, and its effectiveness compared to the benchmark is verified by resorting to different performance metrics from the literature. Further, its effectiveness is verified and compared when Extreme Learning Machines (ELMs) are adopted instead of the ANNs, and when the Persistence model is used. The prediction performance of the two training strategies-based ANN is also investigated and compared in terms of i) different weather conditions (i.e., seasons) experienced by the solar PV system under study and ii) different hour intervals (i.e., ∆ℎ=2, 3, and 4 hours) used for partitioning the overall dataset and, thus, establishing the different ANNs (i.e., H =12, 8, and 6 models, respectively).

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The capability of accurately predicting the Solar Photovoltaic (PV) power productions is crucial to effectively control and manage the electrical grid. In this regard, the objective of this work is to propose an efficient Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model in which 10 different learning algorithms (i.e., different in the way in which the adjustment on the ANN internal parameters is formulated to effectively map the inputs to the outputs) and 23 different training datasets (i.e., different combinations of the real-time weather variables and the PV power production data) are investigated for accurate 1 day-ahead power production predictions with short computational time. In particular, the correlations between different combinations of the historical wind speed, ambient temperature, global solar radiation, PV power productions, and the time stamp of the year are examined for developing an efficient solar PV power production prediction model. The investigation is carried out on a 231 kW ac grid-connected solar PV system located in Jordan. An ANN that receives in input the whole historical weather variables and PV power productions, and the time stamp of the year accompanied with Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) learning algorithm is found to provide the most accurate predictions with less computational efforts. Specifically, an enhancement reaches up to 15, 1, and 5% for the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and Coefficient of Determination (R 2) performance metrics, respectively, compared to the Persistence prediction model of literature.

In this paper, a Firefly algorithm is proposed for identification and comparative study of five, seven and eight parameters of a single and double diode solar cell and photovoltaic module under different solar irradiation and temperature. Further, a metaheuristic algorithm is proposed in order to predict the electrical parameters of three different solar cell technologies. The first is a commercial RTC mono-crystalline silicon solar cell with single and double diodes at 33 • C and 1000 W/m 2. The second, is a flexible hydrogenated amorphous silicon a-Si:H solar cell single diode. The third is a commercial photovoltaic module (Photowatt-PWP 201) in which 36 polycrystalline silicon cells are connected in series, single diode, at 25 • C and 1000 W/m 2 from experimental current-voltage. The proposed constrained objective function is adapted to minimize the absolute errors between experimental and predicted values of voltage and current in two zones. Finally, for performance validation, the parameters obtained through the Firefly algorithm are compared with recent research papers reporting metaheuristic optimization algorithms and analytical methods. The presented results confirm the validity and reliability of the Firefly algorithm in extracting the optimal parameters of the photovoltaic solar cell.

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