Intraday solar irradiance forecasting using public cameras.

With the significant increase in photovoltaic (PV) electricity generation, more attention has been given to PV power forecasting. Indeed, accurate forecasting allows power grid operators to better schedule and dispatch their assets, such as energy storage systems and reserve. In this paper, a hybrid deep learning model and a convolutional neural network with memory is proposed, to provide intraday (2 h) solar irradiance forecasts using sequentially-collected images from public webcams. The performance of the proposed model is compared to those of a standard time-series forecast models, a linear regression as well as state-of-the-art neural networks. All models are trained and tested using images collected from two webcams on EPFL's campus for just over a year. The results show that the proposed method outperforms all other models and matches the state-of-the-art methodology while providing simplicity of implementation and efficient computation. • A novel method for estimating global horizontal irradiance is proposed. • The method uses images public webcams instead of all-sky cameras. • The method combines images from different cameras to improve forecasts' accuracy. • The method can be extended to include other types of data (meteorological data). • This simple method matches state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]