Systematic Analysis and Computational Intelligence Based Modeling of Photovoltaic Power Generation in Snow Conditions

Power prediction for photovoltaic (PV) installations in northern snow-prone areas remains a challenging problem. The behavior of a partially/fully snow-covered PV panel can be complex depending on the snow-related factors, disregarding, which causes large prediction errors in snow conditions. To address this issue, a systematic analysis of the effects of 16 meteorological parameters on the hourly power prediction for systems in a snow-prone area is conducted in this article. According to the best of our knowledge, such comprehensive analysis on various snow-related conditions datasets, i.e., full, snow-free condition, snow condition, and snow-cover condition datasets, for several PV systems is performed for the first time in the literature. The three latter datasets are extracted from the full dataset using a proposed three-step procedure. Moreover, different computational intelligence techniques are implemented to develop hourly prediction models for each dataset of each system. A detailed comparison is then performed between the performance of the proposed models, the Marion model, a modified version of the Marion model, the classic PV model, and a computational intelligence model combined with the Marion model's snow cover detection method. The hourly values of the electrical and meteorologicalparameters for 17 PV systems across Canada, with an aggregated time period of more than 55 years, have been extracted to perform the study. As the results show, categorizing data using the proposed three-step procedure and developing specific computational intelligence models for each condition can significantly improve the prediction accuracy especially when a full/partial snow cover is probable on the panels.