Two-Step Linear Least-Squares Method For Photovoltaic Single-Diode Model Parameters Extraction

In this paper, a new method to calculate the five parameters of the single-diode model of a photovoltaic cell or panel is presented. This new method takes into account the intrinsic properties of the model equation and the technique of linear least-squares fitting; so, the computational complexity and costs are very low. Moreover, the proposed method, named two-step linear least-squares method, is able to work absolutely blindly with any kind of I–V curve. It does not need initial guesses at all and, consequently, it is not necessary to know previously any information of any parameter. The proposed method provides the parameters of the single-diode model just using the coordinates of N points (N 5) of the I–V curve. The results provided by this method in a first stage have the same order of accuracy of the best documented methods in the field of parameters extraction, but, furthermore, in a second stage, the best accuracy documented until now is obtained in two important case studies usually used in the literature as well as in a large-scale I–V curve repository with more than one million of curves.