Prediction of solar irradiance using convolutional neural network and attention mechanism-based long short-term memory network based on similar day analysis and an attention mechanism

As one of the future's most promising clean energy sources, solar energy is the key to developing renewable energy. The randomness of solar irradiance can affect the efficiency of photovoltaic power generation, which makes photovoltaic power generation planning extremely difficult. The main goal of this study is to accurately predict solar irradiance and establish a prediction model with meteorological characteristics to improve prediction accuracy. This paper proposes a convolutional neural network (CNN) and attention mechanism-based long short-term memory network (A-LSTM) to predict solar irradiance the next day. In addition, the prediction accuracy is further improved by combining similar day analyses. A similar day prediction model is constructed by selecting solar energy data from Andhra Pradesh, India. The experimental results show that the method proposed in this paper can predict solar irradiance more accurately, providing a new idea for photovoltaic power generation planning.