Mapping of solar energy potential in Indonesia using artificial neural network and geographical information system

The first objective of this study is to determine the theoretical potential of solar irradiation in Indonesia by using artificial neural networks (ANNs) method. The second objective is to visualize the solar irradiation by province as solar map for the entire of Indonesia. The geographical and meteorological data of 25 locations that were obtained from NASA database are used for training the neural networks and the data from 5 locations were used for testing the estimated values. The testing data were not used in the training of the network in order to give an indication of the performance of the system at unknown locations. In this study, the multi layer perceptron ANNs model, with 9 inputs variables i.e. average temperature, average relative humidity, average sunshine duration, average wind speed, average precipitation, longitude, latitude, latitude, and month of the year were proposed to estimate the monthly solar irradiation as the output. Statistical error analysis in terms of mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) was conducted for testing data to evaluate the performance of ANN model. The best result of MAPE was found to be 3.4% when 9 neurons were set up in the hidden layer. As developing country and wide islands area, Indonesia has the limitation on the number of meteorological station to record the solar irradiation availability; this study shows the ANN method can be an alternative option to estimate solar irradiation data. Monthly solar mapping by province for the entire of Indonesia are developed in GIS environment by putting the location and solar irradiation value in polygon format. Solar irradiation map can provide useful information about the profile of solar energy resource as the input for the solar energy system implementation.