This paper presents the effect of ambient meteorological parameters on the performance of different photovoltaic (PV) technologies based on PVSyst thermal model. The PV technologies considered are: monocrystalline silicon, polycrystalline silicon, amorphous silicon, microcrystalline and cadmium telluride. The study is conducted with hourly meteorological data obtained from PVSyst software meteo-file for Dakar in Senegal, with site coordinate of 14.5° N and 17.0° W. The results show that the different PV technologies have the same cell temperature because PVSyst uses default adsorption coefficient of 0.9 for the different PV technologies. However, the performance of the different PV technologies in response to the cell temperature differs in respect of their thermal coefficient. Among the five PV technologies studied, amorphous silicon has the lowest thermal coefficient and the best thermal response but the worst solar energy conversion efficiency. This means that amorphous silicon would occupy much more space to achieve the same energy output as the other PV technologies studied. Conversely, polycrystalline silicon has the highest thermal coefficient and the worst thermal response but its solar energy conversion efficiency is relatively higher than those of other PV technologies except monocrystalline silicon. The polycrystalline silicon with the same PV module size will yield more energy than its equivalent sized amorphous silicon PV module.