The article cites the need for a reliable and economical power supply to rural consumers. At the same time, it is important to develop distributed generation, including on the basis of renewable sources, using solar and wind energy to reduce costs. The necessity of choosing solar panels with optimal parameters, taking into account the influence of external factors, is shown. To determine the actual generated power of solar batteries, the concept of "power loss during the conversion of the solar radiation flux into electrical power" is introduced. It has been established that insufficient studies of the regime parameters of photocells, in particular, the temperature of its heating and the corresponding change in efficiency, taking into account external factors, do not allow choosing a module with effective power. To study the parameters of solar batteries, an equivalent circuit and methods for determining its parameters are presented. The established dependence of the excess of the SM temperature over the ambient temperature on the power of solar radiation is presented, which formed the basis of an improved method for determining the parameters of solar batteries. The presented results of the study allow at the design stages to determine the expected power of a solar photovoltaic installation and choose its optimal parameters.