The large-scale use of renewable energy technologies would greatly mitigate or eliminate a wide range of environmental and human health impacts of energy use. Renewable energy technologies include solar heating and cooling, hydroelectric power, solar power, and wind power. In this paper, an Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model will be developed for forecasting solar radiation. The solar radiation time-series data obtained from previous records of 29 years period from 1984 to 2012 for Benghazi are used for forecasting solar radiation intensity based on a developed (ARIMA) model. The model’s validation was based on the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) between the actual and predicted values. The MAPE was found to be 6% indicating that the model could be used effectively to predict solar radiation.
Key word: Forecasting, Solar Radiation, ARIMA, MAPE.