Global horizontal irradiance prediction model considering the effect of aerosol optical depth based on the Informer model

Accurate and reliable global horizontal irradiance (GHI) prediction helps respond to the volatility of solar power output in advance. Aerosol optical depth (AOD) is the primary factor affecting the GHI in clear skies. In this study, the Informer model was first used to predict the GHI over the next 8 h by considering the AOD, meteorological parameters, and historical GHI data of Beijing as input variables, and the prediction of the GHI without AOD as a feature was calculated. The comparison results showed that the prediction errors of the models that considered AOD were lower than those of the models that did not. Moreover, when the AOD of the predicted day was larger, the difference in the mean absolute percentage error values between the two models was more significant. Hence, we proposed Planck's average AOD as a feature input to the GHI prediction model and found that the accuracy of the model improved regardless of the AOD size on the prediction day. The applicability of the developed model was verified using Golden's data. Overall, these findings indicate that this model can improve computational efficiency while maintaining good predictive performance.