Abstract
In order to satisfy increasing energy demand and mitigate global warming worldwide, the implementation of photovoltaic (PV) clean energy installations needs to become common practice. However, solar energy is known to be dependent on several random factors, including climatic and geographic conditions. Prior to promoting PV systems, an assessment study of the potential of the considered location in terms of power yield should be conducted carefully. Manual assessment tools are unable to handle high amounts of data. In order to overcome this difficulty, this study aims to investigate various artificial intelligence (AI) models-with respect to various intuitive prediction benchmark models from the literature-for predicting solar energy yield in the Ha'il region of Saudi Arabia. Based on the daily data, seven seasonal models, namely, naive (N), simple average (SA), simple moving average (SMA), nonlinear auto-regressive (NAR), support vector machine (SVM), Gaussian process regression (GPR) and neural network (NN), were investigated and compared based on the root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) performance metrics. The obtained results showed that all the models provided good forecasts over three years (2019, 2020, and 2021), with the naive and simple moving average models showing small superiority. The results of this study can be used by decision-makers and solar energy specialists to analyze the power yield of solar systems and estimate the payback and efficiency of PV projects.