Solar Radiation Forecasting with Statistical Models

Renewable energy electrical generation has experienced significant growth in the recent years. Renewable energies generate electrical energy using different natural resources, such as solar radiation and wind fields. These resources present an unstable behavior because they depend on different meteorological conditions. In order to maintain the balance between input and output electrical energy into the power system, grid operators need to control and predict these fluctuating events. Indeed, forecasting methods are completely necessary to increase the proportion of renewable energies into the system (Heinemann et al. in Forecasting of solar radiation: solar energy resource management for electricity generation from local level to global scale. Nova Science Publishers, New York, 2006 [17], Wittmann et al. in IEEE J Sel Top Appl Earth Obs Remote Sens 1:18–27, 2008 [46]). Reducing the uncertainty of natural resources, operators could reduce maintenance costs, improve the interventions in the intra-day market and optimize management decisions with nonrenewable energies supply. Many forecasting methods are used to obtain solar radiation forecasting for different time horizons. In this chapter, we will focus on several solar radiation forecasting statistical methods for intra-day time horizons using ground and exogenous data as inputs.