Highly Accurate Daily Solar Radiation Forecasting

using SW-SVR for

Hybrid Power Plant in Indonesia
Prasetyo Ajia,b
aGraduate
School of Integrated Science
and Technology, Shizuoka University,
Hamamatsu 432-8011, Japan
e-mail: prasetyo.aji.17@shizuoka.ac.jp
Kazumasa Wakamoria
aGraduate
School of Integrated Science
and Technology, Shizuoka University,
Hamamatsu 432-8011, Japan
Hiroshi Minenoa
aGraduate
School of Integrated Science
and Technology, Shizuoka University,
Hamamatsu 432-8011, Japan

bNational Laboratory for Energy

Conversion Technology, Agency for the

Assessment and Application of
Technology (BPPT),
Puspiptek, Banten 15314, Indonesia
e-mail: prasetyo.aji@bppt.go.id

Abstract--The renewable energy sources become potential
for supplying the electricity in Indonesia. In the equatorial
area, Indonesia has so much potential in solar energy become
the main renewable energy resources. The opportunity
challenges us to increase the use of solar energy into the
electricity system. This paper aims to develop a highly accurate
of daily solar radiation forecasting. We used the limited
ground measurement of the meteorological station such as
temperature, humidity, wind speed, and atmospheric pressure.
The using of Sliding Window-based Support Vector Regression
(SW-SVR) was applied regarding the ability of denoising and
simplifying computation. SW-SVR have been evaluated using
statistical metrics such as Mean Absolute Percentage Error
(MAPE) and Coefficient of Determination (R2). The results
showed the MAPE value obtained 21.9 % and R2 closer to 1. It
indicates the acceptable results that could be a promising
method to be applied in a hybrid power plant in Indonesia.
Keywords-- Renewable Energy, Solar Radiation Forecasting,
SW-SVR, Statistical Metrics
I. INTRODUCTION
Indonesia is the largest islanding country in the world.
There are some rural areas that have not all the area getting
the electricity system. The renewable energy sources
become urgent as a substitute for the fossil energy sources.
In fact, demanding electricity has been growing recently
during economic growth. On the other side, the availability
of energy fossil as common energy in a rural area is limited
due to transportation to the area that makes the price become
higher. The using of renewable energy will be urgent. There
are some rural areas that have not all the area getting the
electricity system. In the equatorial area, the sunshine
duration is almost constant every year. The opportunity
challenges us to use solar energy as the generation of the
electricity system. Common measurement in the area is
temperature, humidity, rainfall, and atmospheric pressure.
However, the measurement of solar radiation is rare in
several areas [1]. The opportunity will be increased by solar
radiation forecasting. Furthermore, meteorological
measurement had relation with solar radiation. Solar
radiation forecasting was obtained by weather forecast as
explanatory variables [2], also satellite data in some areas
were used [3].
The day ahead solar radiation forecasting is used not
only for energy market but also for operation and
maintenance. The operation can be maximized the
efficiency by decreasing operation time of fossil energy.
Getting a good result, some researchers used Artificial
Neural Network (ANN) to forecast solar radiation [4].
Simple methods such as Support Vector Regression (SVR),
Ensemble method, and Random Forest were frequently used.
SVR was applied by using meteorological data with the
promising result [5]. Some results showed SVR better than
ANN due to time computing, lower computer specification
and simple algorithm. Combination of ensemble and SVR
were applied to increase the accuracy and decreased error.
The evaluation of machine learning method was calculated
by statistical metrics such as MAPE and Coefficient of
Determination (R2).
In recent years, Indonesia targeting 20 % of renewable
energy from total energy resources, there are some projects
located in the rural area increasing electricity ratio, also
enhancing the economic growth in the area. Solar radiation
forecasting serves data estimation useful for designing
technically, economically and policy. Stakeholders that
involved in the project can use the data made a proposal for
funding the plant to the bank or other financial institution.

978-1-5386-7553-3/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE


Fig 1. System architecture of energy monitoring system in hybrid power
plant.
The use of the day ahead solar radiation forecasting is
not only for energy market but also for operation and
maintenance. There are some fossil energy resources in the
rural area of Indonesia that has a daily operation. The
operation can be maximized the efficiency by decreasing
operation time. So, the using of fuel can be minimized.
Economy dispatch can be changed due to efficiency. The
government rule will be supported the limitation of fossil
energy by giving incentive, reducing the tax, etc. Meanwhile,
the majority of the method using artificial intelligence and
limited of using support vector regression as the method for
simplifying computation and response time.
In this paper, we used the land measurement of physical
condition as explanatory variables. The measurement was
taken by the weather station system of hybrid energy plant
on baron technopark, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Sliding
window-based support vector regression (SW-SVR) will be
assessed by limited meteorological data measurement. The
using of SW-SVR regression will be potentially applied in a
hybrid plant in Indonesia. The intermittent of solar radiation
was a common problem in Indonesia. The regression
method tried to involve the heavy cloud condition and clear
sky condition. The possibility of integrating the forecasting
into the data acquisition system was also determined due to
data simplicity and concise execution time. Implementation
in the rural area which is limited electrification made the
research explored the possibility of integrating the
forecasting method in utility power management system. It
will be a big opportunity to make new energy management
system in the rural area. The opportunity also bigger when
the monitoring system installed in the hybrid powerplant.
We tried to implement open data for public services.
II. METHODOLOGY AND SCHEME
A. System Architecture
We proposed the method to process the training and
testing data. Monitoring data of Hybrid Power Plant in
Baron Technopark established in 2016. The system consists
of 5 kW wind energy generation, 10 kW wind energy
generation, 36 KWp photo-voltaic plant, 20 KW diesel
engine generator and 20 KW lead acid battery system.
The plant had reconstruction in 2016 including the
implementation of the online monitoring system, weather
station system and upgraded inverter. The weather station
data is started from 2016, November. From the monitoring
data, it served physical value from sensors on each power
generation. The data center has been developed due storing
data in center place. Dataset from a data center that is from
Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) deliver
to the data server. Data server provided all parameters such
as power generation parameter, weather station, and energy
consumption parameter. Design of the web monitoring
showed in Fig 1. Solar radiation forecasting will be applied
to the Application and Data management side. In the
connectivity layer, sensors that installed in some parts such
as weather station, building, power generation, and battery
storage. Data sensors sent to the SCADA due to managing
control system, data storage, and management. Then, data
managed in the data server considered a data query that
created every 20 seconds. For simplicity, data has been
calculated by 15 minutes of the average data query.
Forecasting of solar radiation applied in this section for
creating the value of solar radiation compared to real
measurement. The data forecasting also gave feedback to
SCADA as input for the control system due to estimating
energy from a battery that will be injected to the grid.
Besides, Data management provides a report that can be
used by stakeholders. Finally, the forecasting of solar
radiation showed in the web monitoring system. As mention
above, web monitoring can be open data in the electricity
system. Data can be accessed easily considered the security
by giving the username and password to the stakeholders.
B. Sliding Window-based Support Vector Regression
Sliding Window-based Support Vector Regression has
been successfully predicted micrometeorological [6]. SW-
SVR solve the computational complexity of
unrepresentative data due to the error value, noise, and
uncompleted data. Since the dataset builds from
multidimensional data, the SW-SVR handled the problem.
The dataset of solar radiation in a dry area like Indonesia
archipelago has the difficulty of discriminating of clear sky
data, cloud data, and rainy data. The method adopted in
various environmental condition. SW-SVR has been based
on SVR. SVR find a function of predicted value and real
measurement. Then, the function has been discovered with
the most deviation from the target value. The line as
hyperplane was gotten considered the linearity and
separation between true and predicted value. The graph did
not care about the error as long as they are less than error
separation on hyperplane as fig.
(1)
 Fig 3. MAPE diagram of 5 regression methods.

We used the MAPE as the index of prediction error and

Fig 2. Regression Curve for Testing Data building time calculated based on the CPU clock time as the
index of computational complexity. It is calculation of yi,
and . MAPE is shown as follows:
We minimize weight vector w. Then find the equation
including the error. It takes some errors into account further.
The error has small margin which means penalty and
(4)
increase in proportion to error. In SW-SVR, we fit the
training and testing data. Adjust the number of weak
Where yi is the actual value and is the forecast value.
learners and weight parameter judgment from relation
is the number of test data, yi is the true value, and is the
between the dataset as specialized data. Then, fit kernel trick
predicted value. The difference between yi and is divided
and partial least square solved the multidimensional dataset.
by the actual value yi again. The absolute value in this
The movement of predicting value was also calculated by
calculation is summed for every forecasted point in time and
extract change of specialized data as the equation. The
divided by the number of fitted points n. Multiplying by
movement changed during the time when the training data
100% makes it a percentage error.
obtained. G is specialized data before prediction and G’ is
R2 is coefficient of determination. This indicator is
Specialized data after prediction. w is weight vector. p is
often used in statistics for estimating the performance of the
weight parameter that adjusted in the beginning.
models. It depicts the fraction of the calculated values that
are the closest to the line of measurement data. While the
ideal values of all other statistical indicators used in this
(2) study are 0, values of the coefficient of determination close
to 1 indicate more efficient models:
Furthermore, we extracted training data as St. xi is
explanatory variable and yi is response variable.
(5)
(3)
The sum of squares of residuals also called the residual
sum of squares = SSRES. The total sum of squares
Due to comparable result, we built hypothesis as trained
(proportional to the variance of the data) is SSTOT where yi is
by linear SVR then apply the other regression method as
the actual value and ŷi is the forecast value. Processing the
comparison. Finally, we predicted the value. For the
forecast value, we utilized notebook with specification is
evaluation, the SW-SVR method compared to some
Intel i5 7200U as CPU, 16GB RAM, 500GB HDD, and
regression methods which is used by several researchers
Intel HD Graphics 620. Calculating the regression method
predicting solar radiation such as random forest (RF),
then evaluation using statistical metrics, for applying the
gradient boosting (GB), linear SVR, and SVR.
calculation, scikit-learn module on Python 2.7 was used [8].
C. Evaluation
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The evaluation of the machine learning method, it has
common method such statistical indicators or metrics [7].
This research used such as coefficient of determination or R2
Training and testing dataset of solar radiation
and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE). These
forecasting was using 8 days data. We collected the data as
methods represented correlation between the output from
training data and testing data as short-term prediction. The
the input. Explanatory data has some dataset which
SW-SVR applied with hyperparameter that was adjusted.
multidimensional data. It predicted response variable.
The parameter was used by adjusting depend parameter
Coefficient determination is calculation of 1 minus the sum
tuning such as Epsilon, parameter C and RBF Gamma.
of squares of residuals divided by the total sum of squares.
Fig 4. R2 diagram of 5 regression methods.
Fig 5. RMSE Scores of 5 regression methods
From Fig 2., time zone of forecasting for testing data, for
day 1, SW-SVR was closely predicting the solar radiation,
the different sky condition as training data made the
forecasting missed for time zone before maximum solar
radiation value at noon. In day 2, the forecast was over the
real value with minimum missing data since the training
data with clear sky condition closely similar to the testing
data.
Fig 3. showed, for predicting 1 day ahead, MAPE score
respectively from SW-SVR, RF, GB, linear SVR, and SVR
is 21.9, 34.8, 29.4, 36.02, and 9.11. Essential meteorological
data such as clearness index, rainfall, and sunshine duration
is needed from the result. On the other hand, from Fig.4., the
model of SW-SVR predicted the solar radiation with R-
Square score is 0.98. Compare to the other regression
method such as RF, GB, linear SVR and SVR, the R2 value
is respectively 0.61, 0.9, 0.96 and 0.98. From Fig. 5, it
indicated linearity between predicted value and true value
for SW-SVR, SVR and linear SVR almost close to 1 despite
that happened in the dry or summer season data with several
times of rainy days and cloudy days. Fig 6. showed, for
predicting 1 day ahead, RMSE score respectively from SW-
SVR, RF, GB, linear SVR, and SVR is 64.4, 89.3, 94.4, 53.6,
and 35.1.
RMSE scores showed the SW-SVR has predicted the
solar radiation with difference value between true value and
predicted value around 64.4 W/m2. The results showed SW-
SVR qualified to predict 1 day ahead solar radiation.
Furthermore, it is necessary to improve the algorithm to
decrease the error value. Modify dataset into the better
correlation between variable to improve feature extraction.
Researchers improved the accuracy by Wavelet Transform
Fig 6. Comparison between the predicted and actual data of SW-SVR
models
(WT), normalization, and machine learning combination
methods. Normalization the dataset has made the value
between -1 and +1. Calculation of the solar radiation data
had done to decrease data spread [9].
Noise data could be solved by applying WT that is
suitable for the modeling of local transients and
intermittency [10]. These are common trouble in solar
radiation. The dataset in our research included cloudy day,
sunny day and rainy day that affected error value. The
response variable under all sky conditions has been
successfully predicted solar radiation by using solar
irradiance measurement and satellite data [11]. It will be
considered in the future works. Since, the classification
between sunny day, cloudy day and rainy day did not divide
could presence the significant error.
IV. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORKS
In this research, we assessed the performance of SW-
SVR to the other regression method such as random forest,
gradient boosting, linear SVR and SVR for predicting solar
radiation in hybrid power plant in Indonesia. We used
temperature indoor and outdoor, wind speed, wind direction,
humidity, and atmospheric pressure as explanatory variables.
Evaluating the results is done by metrics analytics such as
coefficient of determination (R2) and Mean Absolute
Percentage Error (MAPE). SW-SVR predicted the solar
radiation with R2 is 0.98 that close to 1. On the other hand,
the MAPE score of SW-SVR method is 21.9. It is the
minimum error that could happen due to noisy data,
uncompleted data, and missing data.
The results that could be a promising method to be
applied in Hybrid Power Plant in Indonesia. For the future
works, the algorithm of SW-SVR needs to improve to
decrease the error value. The alternative is modifying
dataset into the better correlation between variable to
improve feature extraction. For the future works, we will try
maximizing pre-processing method to improve feature
extraction, needed more measurement data such as
precipitation, clearness index, and sunshine hours and
considering data from global meteorological measurement
and forecast.

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