Abstract
<jats:p>Growing importance in Renewable Energy Resources has caused the solar power market to expand rapidly. And the photovoltaic energy is becoming an increasingly important part of the Renewable Energy Resources. Investment in PV energy is rapidly increasing worldwide, and this has intensified the need to analyze the performance of PV systems and energetic productivity of PV arrays for estimating the profitability of their implementation in various locations. To evaluate PV performance outdoors it is very important to guarantee high quality of collected data which depends on the accuracy of the associated measuring instruments. Error sources must be minimized as much as possible. This paper presents a semiautomated system for testing and monitoring the performance of PV modules in outdoor conditions. The purpose of this paper is to develop a low cost system for testing and monitoring the performance of PV modules in outdoor conditions. In order to do this, we improved and adapted another measuring system. This system was developed by us and enables us to ensure the performance of the PV module through testing and monitoring, as well as saving collected data to a database. This database can be accessed through a graphical interface on a laptop connected to the system using serial interface. The error sources of this system are reduced to minimum because of human operators interfering with the system only through the graphical user interface. The performances of PV module were obtained in outdoor conditions and were saved to the database. They will be compared with the performances of the different PV modules to prove the efficiency of the module.</jats:p>