Design of a MATLAB GUI for Day Ahead Forecasting of PV Panel Power

Abstract

This paper introduces design and utilization of a MATLAB graphical user interface (GUI) platform to forecast day ahead hourly Photovoltaic (PV) panel power by using forecasted day ahead global horizontal solar radiation. This platform, which would be a useful and practical tool for researchers who are study on energy management, planning and forecasting studies, consists of three parts. The first part predicts day ahead global horizontal solar radiation by trained artificial neural network (ANN) model. The second part performs the calculation of solar irradiation on the module, which has a tilted angle according to forecasting solar radiation data. The last part estimates the power generated by PV panel according to the calculated incident radiation. In this study, the solar irradiation forecasting, the calculation of incident radiation to tilted module and prediction of the solar power to be generated by the PV module are done. The designed GUI has been utilized to forecast solar radiation and PV output power for test days. Then obtained forecasted data have been evaluated with mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and correlation coefficient (R).