A novel 24 kalman filter bank estimator for solar irradiance prediction for PV power generation

This paper presents a novel approach to reduce the post-processing of Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) grid models to extract solar irradiance predictions for “sub-grid” locations. This technique estimates solar irradiance observations from a NWP model using a novel bank of 24 Kalman Filters (KFs) which operate in tandem to accurately predict the Solar irradiance Zt, 24 hours ahead for a desired node point 51.8830N, 8.5353W, at a campus based Photovoltaic (PV) solar energy resource at Cork Institute of Technology (CIT). The NWP model outputs irradiance values mt for Cork Airport 51.8466N, 8.4891W (2.5km from CIT). The 24 KF bank, acting as a post-processing tool with a moving time averaging window, derives a 24 hour look ahead irradiance schedule for CIT by applying a polynomial to map and filter the irradiance bias offset between the two grid points.