Forecasting of total daily solar energy generation using ARIMA: A case study

In this paper, a well known statistical modeling method named ARIMA has been used to forecast the total daily solar energy generated by a solar panel located in a research facility. The beauty of the ARIMA model lies in its simplicity and it can only be applied to stationary time series. So our time series data, which is seasonal and non-stationary, is transformed into a stationary one for applying the ARIMA model. The model is developed using sophisticated statistical techniques. The optimum model is chosen and validated using Akaike information criterion (AIC) and residual sum of squares (SSE). Error analysis is done to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method. The accuracy of the developed model can be further increased, which is subject to future research.