Solar Photovoltaic Output Power forecasting Using Back Propagation Neural Network

Solar Energy is an important renewable and unlimited source of energy. Solar photovoltaic power forecasting, is an estimation of the expected power production, that help the grid operators to better manage the electric balance between power demand and supply. Neural network is a computational model that can predict new outcomes from past trends. The artificial neural network is used for photovoltaic plant energy forecasting. The output power for solar photovoltaic cell is predicted on hourly basis. In historical dataset collection process, two dataset was collected and used for analysis. The dataset was provided with three independent attributes and one dependent attributes. The implementation of Artificial Neural Network structure is done by Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and training procedure for neural network is done by error Back Propagation (BP). In order to train and test the neural network, the datasets are divided in the ratio 70:30. The accuracy of prediction can be done by using various error measurement criteria and the performance of neural network is to be noted.