A generalized model for short-term forecasting of solar irradiance

In recent years, as the share of solar power in the electrical grid has been increasing, accurate methods for forecasting solar irradiance have become necessary to manage the electrical grid. More specifically, as solar generators are geographically dispersed, it is very important to have general models that can predict solar irradiance without the need of ground data. In this paper, we propose a novel technique that can accomplish that: using satellite images, the proposed model is able to forecast solar irradiance without the need of ground measurements. To illustrate the performance of the proposed model, we consider 15 locations in The Netherlands, and we show that the proposed model is as accurate as local models that are individually trained with ground data.