Photovoltaic systems are used vastly for their ease of installation, maintenance, and direct energy conversion. Most of the energy in such systems is lost in a thermal form. So, it was convenient to make use of this lost thermal energy as a useful heat in the form of hot water, which is called photovoltaic-thermal (PVT) systems. The use of both thermal and electrical energies production increases the overall efficiency of the system and reduces the emissions from producing hot water. In this paper, a cascade channels thermal module is used beside the PV panels for cooling and increasing efficiency. The simulations used parameter ranges of 600–1200 W/m2 of solar radiation, flow rate range from 0.06 to 0.117 kg per sec, and coefficient of convection range of 5.48–20.7W/m2.K. The efficiencies of thermal, electrical, and overall reached 63.42%, 13.95%, and 77.21%, respectively, using this cooling configuration. Moreover, A new model of ANN is proposed to model the PVT system performances. The optimal architecture of the proposed ANN is attained by applying a new optimization technique called archerfish hunting optimizer (AHO). Therefore, a hybrid model of the AHO and ANN is created to obtain the performance of the PVT.