Abstract
Recently, a number of researchers have investigated photovoltaic (PV) system modeling. Modelling a PV panel and its incident solar radiation to predict future trends improves a system's performance. This paper presents a fast, practical method that can be used to predict PV output power. By using present data of weather condition and present output power of the PV system, this predictor is modeled using linear regression analysis. The data from multiple sensors is collected only once before it is correlated to one sensor so that, in the future, only one sensor is needed to collect the data. Several experiments conducted under different weather conditions and different windows sizes of linear regression were completed to validate this method. These results were compared to the Meinel and Meinel model. This method yielded promising results, as the root mean square errors were low.