Spatio-temporal Kriging for spatial irradiance estimation with short-term forecasting in a thermosolar power plant

Abstract

This article proposes a method to improve the efficiency of solar power plants by estimating and forecasting the spatial distribution of direct normal irradiance (DNI) using a sensor network and anemometer data. For this purpose, the proposed approach employs spatio-temporal kriging with an anisotropic spatio-temporal variogram that depends on wind speed to accurately estimate the distribution of DNI in real-time, making it useful for short-term forecast and nowcast of DNI. Finally, the method is validated using synthetic data from varying sky conditions, outperforming another state-of-the-art technique.

Keywords: Direct normal irradiance; Distributed estimation; Forecasting; Kriging; Sensor networks; Thermosolar plant.