The rapid development of grid integration of solar energy in developing countries like India has created vital concerns such as fluctuations and interruptions affecting grid operations. Improving the consistency and accuracy of solar energy forecasts can increase the reliability of the power grid. Although solar energy is available in abundance around the world, it is viewed as an unpredictable source due to uncertain fluctuations in climate conditions. Global horizontal irradiance (GHI) prediction is critical to efficiently manage and forecast the power output of solar power plants. However, developing an accurate GHI forecasting model is challenging due to the variability of weather conditions over time. This research aims to develop and compare univariate LSTM models capable of predicting GHI in a solar power plant in India over the short term. The present study introduces a deep neural network-based (DNN) hybrid model with a combination of convolutional neural network bi-directional long short-term memory (CNN BiLSTM) to predict the one minute interval GHI of a solar power plant located in the southern region of India. The model’s effectiveness was tested using data for the month of January 2023. In addition, the results of the hybrid model were compared to the long short-term memory (LSTM) and BiLSTM deep-learning (DL) models. It has been observed that the proposed hybrid model framework is more accurate compared to the LSTM and BiLSTM architectures. Finally, a GHI prediction tool was developed to understand the trend of the results.