If you are shortlisting solar design software Spain installers actually use in 2026, you are working in the sunniest large market in Europe and one where the hard problems are administrative rather than optical. Irradiance in Andalucia and Murcia is roughly double what a Dutch or Scottish designer works with, which makes the yield number easy and the paperwork decisive. What separates a tool that works in Spain from one that merely renders a roof is whether it handles REBT-compliant electrical documentation, the self-consumption rules in RD 244/2019, the arithmetic of compensacion simplificada de excedentes, and the genuinely awkward case of autoconsumo colectivo. The platform that wins our 2026 bench is SurgePV, a cloud-native all-in-one suite at US$1,299 per user per year on the 5-User Team plan (roughly €1,180 at about €0.91 to the dollar). Below are the ten platforms Spanish instaladores genuinely shortlist, each priced in the currency its vendor actually bills in, with honest limitations on each including ours. You can compare SurgePV pricing before you speak to a sales rep.
Direct answer. The best all-in-one solar design software for Spain in 2026 is SurgePV, at US$1,299 per user per year on the 5-User Team plan (US$6,495 for five seats, roughly €5,900). It ships REBT and ITC-BT-40 compliance flags on the generated single-line diagram, RD 244/2019 self-consumption modelling with and without excedentes, compensacion simplificada capped correctly against the energy term of the bill, hourly reparto coefficients for autoconsumo colectivo, temperature derating tuned to Spanish summer cell temperatures, 8,760-hour module-level shading and white-label Spanish proposals on every plan. For lender-grade yield reports on financed plants, PVsyst is still the document funders ask for by name.
This guide is written for instaladores, ingenierias, EPCs and in-house design teams shipping five or more projects a month. We rank ten platforms on four criteria: Spanish regulatory depth, engineering rigour, workflow coverage from address to signed presupuesto, and total cost of ownership in euros for a five-person team.
What Makes Spanish Solar Design Different
Five things, and only one of them is about sunshine.
The REBT governs the electrical design and the paperwork it produces. The Reglamento Electrotecnico para Baja Tension, approved by Real Decreto 842/2002, is the low voltage electrical regulation, and ITC-BT-40 is the instruction covering generating installations connected to the network. Protections, earthing, cable sizing, the anti-islanding interface and the labelling on your unifilar all trace back to it. Legalisation then runs through a memoria tecnica de diseno for smaller installations or a full proyecto signed by a competent technician above the threshold your Comunidad Autonoma sets, plus a certificado de instalacion electrica from the installer and registration with the regional industry department. A drawing set labelled to NEC or BS 7671 conventions is not a document a Spanish industry office will accept.
RD 244/2019 defines what kind of self-consumption you are designing. The Real Decreto splits installations into sin excedentes, where an anti-export device prevents any injection, and con excedentes, which further splits into those eligible for compensacion simplificada and those selling to the market. The choice changes the metering arrangement, the contract with the comercializadora, the registration path and the financial model. It is the first question on any Spanish job, and a tool that treats it as a checkbox rather than a branching model will produce the wrong bill comparison.
Compensacion simplificada has a hard ceiling. Surplus energy is compensated monthly against the energy term of the bill, and the compensation can never exceed that energy term. A bill cannot go negative, and surplus value cannot be carried into the next month. In practice this puts a firm cap on how much it pays to oversize a residential array, because every kWh beyond the point where the monthly energy term is fully cancelled earns nothing at all. This one rule is the single most common modelling error we see in Spanish proposals produced by imported software.
Autoconsumo colectivo is a genuinely distinct problem. Several consumers share one generation installation through a reparto agreement whose coefficients must sum to 1 for every hour, all linked under a single CAU code, with each participant keeping their own CUPS and their own supply contract. The proximity rule that started at 500 metres was widened to 2,000 metres by RDL 20/2022 for installations on roofs, industrial land and artificial structures, and a further widening to 5,000 metres followed in 2025. Coefficients may be fixed or vary by hour, and the design question is no longer only where the panels go, it is how the production is split so that every participant’s compensation is actually used rather than wasted against a small energy term. Most design tools model one meter and one bill, which is why this case gets handled badly.
Heat is a design variable, not a footnote. In July in Cordoba or Sevilla, module cell temperatures pass 65 degrees on a well-ventilated roof and higher on a tight in-roof mount. With a typical power temperature coefficient near minus 0.30 to minus 0.35 percent per degree, that is a double-digit percentage loss against nameplate at exactly the hours of peak irradiance. Ventilation gap, mounting height, module technology and inverter thermal derating all become live choices. Meanwhile winter mornings still need correct low-temperature Voc string sizing on the meseta, where design lows are far colder than the coastal stereotype suggests.
📘 Regulation note
A Spanish self-consumption installation is designed to the REBT and ITC-BT-40, classified under Real Decreto 244/2019 as sin excedentes or con excedentes, connected through the local distribuidora under access and connection rules supervised by the CNMC, and registered with the industry department of its Comunidad Autonoma. Municipal IBI and ICIO rebates are separate, granted by ordenanza fiscal, and vary by town. Confirm the local ordenanza before you put a rebate figure in a presupuesto.
Bring one of your own sites to a free SurgePV demo. We will build the 3D roof from a satellite address, run the 8,760-hour shading simulation, and hand you the SLD, BOQ and branded proposal on the call.
Book a free SurgePV demo → Compare pricingWhy Spanish Firms Still Run PVsyst, PV*SOL and Polysun
This is the section sponsored roundups skip, so let us do it properly. Spain has a large utility-scale sector and a mature consulting profession, and both were built on the European desktop toolchain. PVsyst above all, with PV*SOL premium and Polysun behind it, has real incumbency here. That is not inertia.
Recognition at the receiving end. Spain runs a lot of financed solar. When a bank, a fund’s technical adviser or an independent engineer opens a yield report on a 50 MW plant in Extremadura, a PVsyst loss diagram is a document they have read hundreds of times. They know its assumptions, they know where the P90 comes from, and they know which lines to interrogate. On financed work this is a real advantage that no newer platform can claim away, and it is the strongest single argument against switching.
Depth in the things Spanish engineering cares about. PVsyst’s near-shading model, horizon handling, bifacial modelling and documented loss tree remain the benchmark, and bifacial matters here because high albedo ground-mount sites are common. PV*SOL’s 3D shading walkthrough is the most persuasive customer-facing shading explanation in any tool on this list, which sells jobs in a living room in Valencia as well as it does in Berlin. Polysun earns its place through coupled modelling of PV with aerotermia and hot water, which is increasingly how Spanish renovation projects are scoped.
Licence economics suit small ingenierias. These tools are cheap next to the cloud platforms, and we are not going to dress that up. PVsyst Professional is CHF 700 per user per year and PV*SOL premium is EUR 845 per named user per year plus VAT, so a three person ingenieria licences either for well under what five cloud seats cost. Perpetual licences ended at Valentin on 19 November 2024, so both are annual subscriptions now, but the per-seat number is still the lower one.
Where they genuinely lose. All three are Windows desktop tools. None produces a customer-ready white-label presupuesto a sales team can send without rework. None supports live collaboration between an office designer and a technician on a roof in Murcia. Crucially, none of them models autoconsumo colectivo reparto coefficients, the compensacion simplificada ceiling, or the REBT documentation set, so the Spanish regulatory and financial reality gets rebuilt in spreadsheets alongside the simulation. And none ships satellite-derived 3D roof capture, so every job starts with manual tracing.
The honest conclusion: if your deliverable is a bankable yield report, PVsyst stays in your stack whatever else you buy, and we would tell you that on a sales call. If your deliverable is a design plus a signed presupuesto at volume, a cloud platform carrying the Spanish rules saves the hours. Plenty of Spanish firms run both, and that is a reasonable answer.
Get your sizing sanity-checked. For a fast independent second opinion on system size and payback before you build the design, run the numbers through our free solar calculator or talk to our engineering team.
The 4-Point Spain Bench Test
This is the framework we use internally before deploying any design platform on our own solar EPC work. Each tool scores 1 to 10 on four axes, out of 40. We do not deploy anything below 32.
- Spanish regulatory depth. REBT and ITC-BT-40 labelling on the generated unifilar, memoria tecnica and CIE data capture, RD 244/2019 classification as sin or con excedentes, compensacion simplificada capped at the energy term, autoconsumo colectivo reparto coefficients, distribuidora access and connection data, and awareness that IBI and ICIO rebates are municipal.
- Engineering rigour. 8,760-hour module-level simulation, P50 and P90 outputs in the format Spanish lenders typically ask for, temperature derating against real Spanish cell temperatures, bifacial and albedo modelling for ground mount, and low-temperature Voc string sizing for the meseta.
- Workflow coverage. Address to REBT-labelled unifilar to lista de materiales to branded Spanish-language presupuesto in one licence, with DXF or DWG export for the ingeniero.
- Total cost of ownership in euros. Licence plus updates plus add-ons plus onboarding time, per finished project, across a five-person team.
Scores across the ten platforms: SurgePV 37, PVsyst 32, RatedPower 30, PV*SOL premium 30, CYPE 28, HelioScope 28, Aurora 25, OpenSolar 27, PVcase 27, Polysun 26. The scoring is ours and it is opinionated. The gap between SurgePV and PVsyst narrows to nothing the moment your deliverable is a bankable report rather than a proposal.
Top 10 Solar Design Software in Spain Compared
Pricing below is 2026, taken from each vendor’s own published page and quoted in the currency that vendor bills in. Where we add a euro figure it is an approximate conversion at about €0.91 to the US dollar and €1.07 to the Swiss franc, and it moves with the exchange rate.
| # | Platform | Vendor price (mid plan) | Key capability | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | SurgePV | US$1,299/user/yr (~€1,180) | All-in-one design, 8,760-hr simulation, REBT-labelled unifilar, Spanish proposals | Instaladores and EPCs doing 5+ projects a month |
| 2 | PVsyst | CHF 700/user/yr (~€750) | Reference-grade simulation physics and bifacial modelling | Lender due diligence and utility-scale plants |
| 3 | RatedPower | Not publicly listed, quote only | Automated utility-scale plant engineering, built in Madrid | Developers at 10 MW and above |
| 4 | PV*SOL premium | EUR 845/named user/yr + VAT | Best 3D shading walkthrough, deep EU component data | Ingenierias and established instaladores |
| 5 | CYPE (CYPELEC REBT) | Per-module REBT price not publicly listed; CYPE shop lists CYPELEC BASIC €1,300 and CYPELEC ADVANCED €2,800 as permanent licences | REBT-native electrical calculation and Spanish documentation | Ingenierias producing proyectos and memorias |
| 6 | HelioScope | $259/user/mo Pro ($2,640/yr) | Bankable C&I yield simulation | Consultancies on commercial roofs |
| 7 | PVcase | Not publicly listed, quote only | Terrain-aware ground-mount layout in CAD | Ground-mount developers on sloped terrain |
| 8 | Aurora Solar | $220/user/mo Premium billed annually ($2,640/yr) | Deepest residential design and sales workflow | Multinationals with an existing Aurora process |
| 9 | Polysun | Not publicly listed | Coupled PV, aerotermia and thermal simulation | Renovation and sector-coupling work |
| 10 | OpenSolar | Core platform free | Free design tier | Solo installers under 3 designs a month |
The honest read: Spain is two markets. For rooftop autoconsumo the real choice is between positions 1, 4, 5 and 10. For ground mount and utility scale it is between 2, 3 and 7, and those three barely overlap with the rooftop set. Firms that do both usually carry one from each column, which is exactly the cost problem this article is about.
1. SurgePV
What it does best. SurgePV runs the whole motion in one licence: satellite address to AI-generated 3D roof, 8,760-hour module-level shading, string sizing, REBT and ITC-BT-40 labelled unifilar, lista de materiales, financial model and white-label Spanish presupuesto. For Spain the regulatory layer is the reason to look. RD 244/2019 classification is a branching input rather than a checkbox, so sin excedentes designs carry the anti-vertido logic and con excedentes designs carry the metering arrangement. Compensacion simplificada is capped against the monthly energy term, which stops the model paying for surplus that in reality earns nothing. Autoconsumo colectivo is modelled with per-participant hourly reparto coefficients that must sum to 1, so you can see which participant is wasting compensation before the reparto agreement is signed. Temperature derating uses real Spanish cell temperatures rather than a European default. Clara AI takes instructions in Spanish, for example “disena 30 kWp en cubierta plana, autoconsumo colectivo con seis participantes, coeficientes horarios”.
Pricing. US$1,299 per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, so US$6,495 for five seats, roughly €1,180 a seat and €5,900 for the team. Individual seats are US$1,899 a year, about €1,730. Enterprise is quoted. Free trial, no credit card. Said plainly: SurgePV is not the cheapest tool here. Five PVsyst seats at CHF 3,500 and five PV*SOL premium seats at EUR 4,225 both come in lower, an Aurora Basic seat at $1,620 a year undercuts a SurgePV Individual seat, and OpenSolar’s core platform is free.
Who it suits. Instaladores and EPCs doing five or more designs a month, teams selling residential autoconsumo alongside commercial roofs, and firms whose current stack is a desktop simulator plus a spreadsheet plus a separate presupuesto tool.
Honest limitations. Four real ones. Brand recognition is the biggest: SurgePV launched in 2025, and a bank or a fund’s technical adviser reviewing a financed Spanish plant has never seen its report format, where a PVsyst output needs no introduction. It does not generate the full memoria tecnica de diseno or the proyecto document in the format a Comunidad Autonoma industry office expects, so an ingenieria still assembles the legalisation pack, and CYPE beats us squarely on that. It carries no municipal database of IBI and ICIO rebates, which vary town by town, so that line is manual. And on utility-scale ground mount with irregular terrain, PVcase and RatedPower produce better layouts than we do.
Book a SurgePV demo and bring a real Spanish project, ideally a colectivo, so you can judge the reparto modelling on your own job rather than a showcase file.
2. PVsyst
What it does best. PVsyst is the reference simulation engine, and in Spain it is what a bank’s technical adviser asks for by name on any financed plant. Its near-shading model, horizon handling, documented loss tree, bifacial gain modelling and parametric studies remain the benchmark. On high-albedo ground-mount sites in Extremadura and Castilla-La Mancha the bifacial modelling in particular is the reason it stays. On bankability it beats SurgePV, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Pricing. CHF 700 per user per year for the Professional annual subscription, roughly €750. Five seats are CHF 3,500 before the 5 to 20 percent group discount. Education is CHF 420, Training and Research CHF 560, Student CHF 25 and PVsystCLI CHF 3,000.
Who it suits. Technical due diligence teams, utility-scale developers and anyone whose deliverable is a lender-grade report rather than a customer-facing presupuesto.
Honest limitations. Windows desktop, steep learning curve, no design workflow in the instalador sense, no proposals, no CRM, no REBT documentation and no autoconsumo modelling at all. Compensacion simplificada, reparto coefficients and the municipal rebate all live in someone’s spreadsheet. It is a physics tool, not a business tool. Our PVsyst alternative guide covers where the tradeoff sits.
3. RatedPower
What it does best. RatedPower was founded in Madrid and built for the Spanish utility-scale boom, which is why it understands the shape of these projects better than any imported tool. It automates plant engineering end to end for large ground-mount sites: layout, electrical design, cable schedules, losses and documentation in hours rather than weeks, with fast iteration across dozens of layout scenarios on the same parcel. For a developer comparing twenty sites before committing to one, that iteration speed is the product.
Pricing. Not publicly listed. RatedPower, now part of Enverus, quotes per customer and publishes no price table. Figures above $15,000 a seat circulate in the industry, but that is an industry-observed estimate rather than anything the vendor has confirmed.
Who it suits. Utility-scale developers at 10 MW and above, and the engineering teams inside Spanish IPPs.
Honest limitations. No rooftop relevance whatsoever, so it does not compete for the autoconsumo market that most readers of this article work in. Enterprise contract terms, no proposal workflow for an end customer, and no REBT low-voltage documentation, because it is aimed at a different regulatory tier.
4. PV*SOL premium
What it does best. Valentin Software built PV*SOL for the German market and Spanish ingenierias adopted it. The 3D shading walkthrough is the best customer-facing shading explanation in any tool on this list, the European component database is deep, and inverter matching is careful. On the mixed roof geometry of Spanish urban buildings, with roof terraces, plant rooms and close neighbours, it handles obstruction well.
Pricing. EUR 845 per named user per year plus VAT for PVSOL premium, with standard PVSOL at EUR 585. Five premium seats are EUR 4,225, which is less than five SurgePV seats. Perpetual licences bought before 19 November 2024 remain usable indefinitely, but maintenance renewals on them ended on 1 October 2024.
Who it suits. Ingenierias and established instaladores with experienced designers, especially where the deliverable is a technical estudio de produccion.
Honest limitations. Windows desktop install, so no live collaboration and no working from a phone on a roof. Proposal output is not a sales document. Its financial module is built around German feed-in logic, so compensacion simplificada and its ceiling need manual construction, and autoconsumo colectivo is outside its model entirely. No AI assistant, no satellite roof capture.
5. CYPE (CYPELEC REBT)
What it does best. CYPE is a Spanish engineering software house from Alicante, and CYPELEC REBT calculates low voltage electrical installations directly against the REBT, producing the calculations, schedules and documentation a Spanish proyecto needs in the format the industry office expects. For an ingenieria whose job ends with a signed and stamped legalisation pack rather than a customer proposal, this is the tool that does the part nobody else does. The comparable Spanish alternative is dmELECT, which serves the same need with a different interface.
Pricing. CYPE sells permanent licences rather than annual seats, and it does not publish a price for the CYPELEC REBT modules on their own. What its shop does list is the bundled electrical packages: CYPELEC BASIC at €1,300 and CYPELEC ADVANCED at €2,800, both as one-off permanent licences. On top of that sits the contrato de mejoras, now branded CYPE one, a separate annual updates contract whose price depends on which programs your licence covers and which CYPE does not publish. Ask for a written quote covering both parts, because the updates contract renews every year and the licence purchase does not.
Who it suits. Ingenierias and technical offices producing proyectos, memorias tecnicas and legalisation documentation for Spanish installations.
Honest limitations. It is a calculation and documentation environment, not a solar design platform. No 8,760-hour yield simulation, no shading model worth the name, no 3D roof capture, no proposal output and no financial modelling of autoconsumo. Nobody chooses CYPE instead of a PV tool. They choose it alongside one, which is a real cost most Spanish comparisons forget to count.
6. HelioScope
What it does best. Module-level 8,760-hour simulation for commercial and industrial roofs with a clean loss tree and export that Spanish lenders and independent engineers accept without argument. On a 400 kWp nave industrial roof it is defensible, and its handling of row-level mutual shading is good.
Pricing. Basic is $159 per user per month ($1,620 a year) and Pro is $259 ($2,640 a year), each covering one user and 10 projects a month, with DC design caps of 1.25 MW on Basic and 5 MW on Pro. Five Pro seats are $13,200 a year. HelioScope is Aurora-owned.
Who it suits. Consultancies and C&I-only teams whose deliverable is a yield report.
Honest limitations. No Spanish regulatory layer at all, no REBT labelling, no RD 244/2019 logic, no colectivo modelling, no AI 3D roof, and weak proposal tooling that forces a second licence. Read our HelioScope alternative guide before committing five seats.
7. PVcase
What it does best. Terrain-aware ground-mount layout inside AutoCAD, which matters on Spanish sites where slope, dehesa vegetation, parcel boundaries and archaeological setbacks drive row spacing and pile schedules. Because so much Spanish ground mount sits on genuinely uneven terrain, this is a more relevant tool here than in flatter markets.
Pricing. Not publicly listed. PVcase quotes per customer and requires an AutoCAD licence on top, so any per-seat figure in a software directory is an unverified third-party estimate.
Who it suits. Ground-mount developers and EPCs working on sloped or irregular parcels.
Honest limitations. No rooftop or residential relevance, no proposal workflow, and it assumes an AutoCAD-competent operator. Most readers of this article are outside its target market.
8. Aurora Solar
What it does best. The deepest residential design and sales workflow in the English-speaking market, with mature roof plane detection and strong customer-facing presentation. If your group already runs Aurora in another country, standardising has real value.
Pricing. Basic is $135 per user per month billed annually ($1,620 a year, $159 monthly) and Premium is $220 billed annually ($2,640 a year, $259 monthly), each covering one user and 50 projects a month. Enterprise is custom. Five Basic seats are $8,100 a year and five Premium seats $13,200. LIDAR modelling, bankable shade reports and battery modelling are Premium features, and plan sets are a separately priced service rather than a plan inclusion, with site models from $9.99. An Aurora Basic seat at $1,620 a year is cheaper than a SurgePV Individual seat at $1,899.
Who it suits. Multinational installers extending an existing Aurora process into Spain.
Honest limitations. The Spanish layer is thin: no RD 244/2019 branching, no compensacion simplificada ceiling, no reparto coefficients for colectivo, no REBT labelling. Per-seat monthly pricing also scales painfully. See our Aurora Solar alternative comparison.
9. Polysun
What it does best. Vela Solaris built Polysun around coupled energy systems, so it simulates PV together with aerotermia, thermal solar, storage and hot water in one model. As Spanish renovation projects increasingly bundle a heat pump with the array, a coupled model is something the pure PV tools do not offer.
Pricing. Not publicly listed. Vela Solaris sells a one-off purchase plus an annual service subscription, or a lease with a 12-month minimum, and quotes on request. A EUR 699 figure circulating in software directories traces back to a 2013 price list, so do not budget from it.
Who it suits. Ingenierias doing renovation and sector-coupling work, and energy consultants producing whole-building advice.
Honest limitations. It is a simulation environment, not a sales platform. No white-label presupuesto, no AI, no satellite roof capture, and the PV-only workflow is slower than a dedicated PV tool. If you never touch heat, it is the wrong purchase.
10. OpenSolar
What it does best. A free design tier with polished residential templates and a short learning curve. For a one-person instalador doing two or three jobs a month it is hard to argue with on price.
Pricing. The core platform is free. From 16 April 2026 OpenSolar charges for API Access on a per project basis and for Connectors on a flat monthly basis, but it has not published those rates and they vary by geography, so ask OpenSolar directly before you budget for them.
Who it suits. Solo installers and new entrants who need working proposals without a licence commitment.
Honest limitations. Spanish regulatory support is shallow, the compensacion and reparto logic needs manual work, and there is no bankable output for financed commercial work. On price there is no contest and we will not pretend there is: a free platform beats ours, so the question is only whether the RD 244/2019 branching and the colectivo modelling are worth paying for in your workflow. See our OpenSolar alternative analysis.
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Pricing in Euros for a Five-Person Team
| Platform | Entry | Mid | Five seats per year | What is bundled |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SurgePV | $1,899/user/yr Individual | $1,299/user/yr (5-User Team) | $6,495 (~€5,900) | REBT labelling, RD 244/2019, colectivo reparto, AI 3D, 8,760-hr, unifilar, lista de materiales, DXF/DWG, Spanish proposals |
| OpenSolar | Core platform free | Core platform free | Free, plus unpublished API and Connector rates from 16 Apr 2026 | Free design and proposals; API Access and Connectors chargeable, rates not published |
| PVsyst | CHF 700/user/yr | n/a | CHF 3,500 before the 5-20% group discount (~€3,750) | Simulation only |
| CYPE (CYPELEC REBT) | Not publicly listed per module | CYPELEC BASIC €1,300 permanent licence | Not publicly listed; permanent licences plus an unpublished annual CYPE one updates contract | REBT calculation and legalisation documentation |
| PV*SOL premium | EUR 585 standard PV*SOL | EUR 845/named user/yr + VAT | EUR 4,225 + VAT | Desktop simulation, 3D shading, weak proposals |
| Polysun | Not publicly listed | Not publicly listed | Not publicly listed | Coupled PV, heat pump, thermal simulation |
| HelioScope | $159/user/mo Basic | $259/user/mo Pro | $13,200 Pro (~€12,000) | Engineering depth, weak proposals, 10 projects/user/mo |
| Aurora Solar | $135/user/mo Basic annually | $220/user/mo Premium annually | $8,100 Basic or $13,200 Premium | Residential workflow, thin Spanish layer, plan sets priced separately |
| PVcase | Not publicly listed | Not publicly listed | Not publicly listed, plus AutoCAD | Ground mount CAD only |
| RatedPower | Not publicly listed | Not publicly listed | Not publicly listed | Utility-scale automation only |
The comparison a Spanish rooftop firm should actually run is SurgePV at $6,495 for five seats against the stack most instaladores have now, which is PVSOL or a free tool for design, PVsyst for anything financed, CYPE for the legalisation pack, and a spreadsheet holding compensacion and reparto. On licence cost alone that stack can come in lower, because five PVSOL premium seats are EUR 4,225 and five PVsyst seats are CHF 3,500, and we would rather say so than argue with a price list a reader can open in one click. Note also that CYPE does not disappear when you buy a PV platform, because SurgePV does not produce the memoria tecnica in the industry office format. Count it in both columns and the honest saving is smaller than a vendor slide would suggest.
The Reparto Test: Five Checks for Autoconsumo Colectivo
We call this the Reparto Test. Collective self-consumption is where Spanish projects go wrong quietly, because the design looks fine and the disappointment arrives on the first bill. Run any tool you are evaluating through all five with a real colectivo before you buy.
- Do coefficients sum to 1 for every hour? The reparto agreement must allocate all production, hour by hour. A tool that applies one annual percentage per participant will hide the hours where a participant is allocated more than they can use.
- Is each participant’s compensation capped separately? Compensacion simplificada is applied per CUPS against that participant’s own monthly energy term. A shared pot calculation overstates the group benefit, sometimes badly, when one participant has a small bill.
- Does the tool show wasted allocation? The output a client needs is a per-participant figure for compensation earned versus compensation actually usable. That number is what drives the negotiation over coefficients.
- Can coefficients be varied by hour and re-tested? Fixed coefficients suit similar consumers. A mix of an office, a bakery and six flats needs hourly variation, and the tool should let you iterate and compare.
- Does it check proximity and the CAU structure? All participants share one CAU while keeping their own CUPS, and the distance rule has moved from 500 metres to 2,000 metres and again to 5,000 metres for qualifying installations. A tool with a hard-coded old limit will refuse a design that is now legal.
⚠️ Watch out
If a source you are reading mentions the impuesto al sol, stop reading it. The charge on self-consumed energy was abolished in October 2018 by Real Decreto-ley 15/2018, and RD 244/2019 replaced the whole framework a few months later. Content that still repeats it is at least seven years out of date, which usually means its pricing, distance limits and compensation rules are wrong too.
Municipal Rebates, Heat and the Numbers Behind a Spanish Proposal
Two lines in a Spanish presupuesto get copied from templates and are wrong more often than any other: the municipal tax rebate and the summer performance figure.
IBI, the property tax, can be reduced by up to 50 percent of the cuota integra where a solar thermal or electrical system is installed, but only where the ayuntamiento has passed an ordenanza fiscal granting it, and the terms vary widely: some towns give 10 percent for six years, others 50 percent for seven. ICIO, the tax on construction and works, is separately reduced by a large majority of ayuntamientos. Around two thirds of Spanish municipios offer an IBI rebate and about three quarters offer an ICIO rebate, so the odds are good but the figure is never national. Any proposal that states a rebate as if it were a nationwide entitlement will eventually embarrass the person who signed it. Check the ordenanza for the specific town.
The second line is summer performance. Spanish irradiance is high and Spanish module temperatures are higher, so the ratio between nameplate and real July output is worse here than the sunshine suggests. A design that sets the array flush against a tiled roof with a minimal ventilation gap can lose several percent more than a raised mount on the same building, and inverters mounted in an unshaded outdoor location will thermally derate in the same hours. Design the ventilation, and put the inverter somewhere shaded. Our sister engineering team covers the sizing arithmetic in their solar inverter sizing guide, and Spain’s deployment context sits with the International Energy Agency and IRENA country profiles.
Mistakes Spanish Instaladores Make Choosing Design Software
-
1
Modelling surplus as if it always pays. Compensacion simplificada cannot take the energy term below zero and does not carry over. Past that point extra kWp earns nothing, and the payback curve flattens.
-
2
Selling a colectivo with flat annual coefficients. The reparto has to work hour by hour. Flat percentages allocate production to participants who are not consuming it, and the wasted share never shows up in the proposal.
-
3
Promising an IBI rebate that the ayuntamiento does not grant. It is municipal, capped at 50 percent, and set by ordenanza fiscal. Check the town, not the province.
-
4
Using a European temperature default in Andalucia. July cell temperatures above 65 degrees cost double digits against nameplate at peak irradiance. Model the ventilation gap and the inverter location.
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5
Assuming a PV platform replaces CYPE. It does not produce the memoria tecnica in the format the industry office wants. Budget for both, or budget for an external ingenieria.
These patterns are not Spain-specific in kind, only in detail. Our writeup on common mistakes EPC companies make in rooftop solar covers the wider set, and the global solar design software ranking puts these ten platforms in international context.
Should a Spanish Installer Standardise on SurgePV?
- ✓ You design 5+ Spanish projects a month
- ✓ You sell autoconsumo colectivo and want the reparto modelled
- ✓ Your compensacion logic lives in a spreadsheet today
- ✓ Designers and sales need the same live project
- ✗ Your deliverable is a bankable yield report (PVsyst)
- ✗ Your deliverable is the legalisation pack (CYPE or dmELECT)
- ✗ You develop plants at 10 MW and above (RatedPower)
- ✗ You quote PV together with aerotermia (Polysun)
Verdict. For a five-person Spanish instalador covering residential autoconsumo, colectivo and commercial roofs, SurgePV wins on bundled scope and on the RD 244/2019 and reparto modelling. It does not win on headline licence price, because PVsyst and PV*SOL are cheaper per seat and OpenSolar is free. For an ingenieria whose product is a stamped proyecto, CYPE stays regardless, and for anyone producing bankable reports so does PVsyst. We would say both on a sales call.
How Heaven Green Energy and SurgePV Help Spanish Teams
Heaven Green Energy has delivered more than 10,000 solar installations, and our engineering group builds the software we use ourselves. SurgePV came out of that: a design suite written by people who had to produce inspection-ready drawings on deadline. For Spanish teams the entry points are:
- Shadow analysis for 8,760-hour module-level shading on dense urban roofs and roof terraces.
- Rooftop detailed engineering design when you need a full drawing package produced by a dedicated team.
- P50, P90 and P99 yield reports explained before you hand a probability figure to a lender.
- QuickEstimate proposal generator if your gap is sales follow-up rather than design.
If you also run projects outside Spain, our commercial solar and industrial solar pages set out how the same design stack carries across markets.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best solar design software for Spain in 2026?
SurgePV ranks first on our 4-Point Spain Bench Test with 37 of 40, at US$1,299 per user per year on the 5-User Team plan (US$6,495 for five seats, roughly €5,900), because it bundles REBT and ITC-BT-40 labelled output, RD 244/2019 branching between sin and con excedentes, compensacion simplificada capped at the monthly energy term, hourly reparto coefficients for autoconsumo colectivo, 8,760-hour simulation and a Spanish-language presupuesto in one cloud licence. PVsyst scores 32 and stays in the stack of anyone producing bankable reports, and CYPE remains necessary for the legalisation pack.
What is autoconsumo colectivo and why is it hard to model?
Autoconsumo colectivo lets several consumers share one generation installation under a single CAU code while each keeps their own CUPS and supply contract. Production is split by reparto coefficients that must allocate all output hour by hour, and each participant’s compensation is capped separately against their own monthly energy term. Most design tools model one meter and one bill, so they cannot show which participant is being allocated energy they cannot use. That wasted allocation is the number the reparto negotiation turns on.
How does compensacion simplificada de excedentes work?
Surplus exported energy is compensated monthly against the energy term of the participant’s electricity bill. The compensation can never exceed that energy term, so a bill cannot go negative, and unused surplus value does not carry into the next month. The practical consequence is a ceiling on useful system size: beyond the point where the monthly energy term is fully cancelled, additional kWp earns nothing under this scheme, and the customer would need a market sale arrangement instead.
Is the impuesto al sol still charged in Spain?
No. The charge on self-consumed solar energy was abolished in October 2018 by Real Decreto-ley 15/2018, and Real Decreto 244/2019 then replaced the entire self-consumption framework in April 2019. Any article, calculator or proposal template still referencing it is at least seven years out of date, which usually means its distance limits, compensation rules and pricing are wrong as well. Treat it as a fast test of whether a source is current.
What distance is allowed between generation and consumption in a colectivo?
The original rule was 500 metres. Real Decreto-ley 20/2022 widened it to 2,000 metres for installations on roofs, industrial land and artificial structures, and a further widening to 5,000 metres for qualifying installations followed in 2025. There is also an alternative route based on sharing the first fourteen digits of the cadastral reference. Because the limit has moved twice, any tool or checklist with a hard-coded figure should be verified against the current text before you reject a site.
Which regulations govern a Spanish solar installation?
The REBT, Real Decreto 842/2002, governs the low voltage electrical design, with ITC-BT-40 covering generating installations connected to the network. Real Decreto 244/2019 sets the administrative, technical and economic conditions for self-consumption. Access and connection through the local distribuidora follow rules supervised by the CNMC. Legalisation needs a memoria tecnica de diseno or a full proyecto depending on size, a certificado de instalacion electrica, and registration with the industry department of the Comunidad Autonoma.
How much do IBI and ICIO rebates save on a Spanish solar project?
IBI, the property tax, can be reduced by up to 50 percent of the cuota integra where solar is installed, but only if the ayuntamiento has passed an ordenanza fiscal granting it, and terms range from 10 percent for six years to 50 percent for seven. ICIO, the tax on the works themselves, is reduced by a large majority of ayuntamientos. Around two thirds of Spanish municipios offer an IBI rebate and roughly three quarters an ICIO rebate, so verify the specific town before quoting a figure.
What is SurgePV’s biggest weakness for Spanish installers?
It does not produce the memoria tecnica de diseno or the full proyecto in the format a Comunidad Autonoma industry office expects, so CYPE or dmELECT stays in the stack for legalisation and beats us squarely on that job. Brand recognition on financed work is the second gap, since a fund’s technical adviser has never seen a SurgePV report where a PVsyst output needs no introduction. It also carries no municipal database of IBI and ICIO rebates, and PVcase and RatedPower produce better utility-scale ground-mount layouts.
Stop paying for four tools. Design it all in one.
SurgePV replaces Aurora + HelioScope + PVsyst + a separate proposal tool in a single license. AI 3D roof in under 60 seconds, bankable 8,760-hour simulation, auto-SLD, BOQ, DXF/DWG export and branded proposals.
Free trial, no credit card · $1,299 per user per year on the 5-User Team planDisclaimer: SurgePV is our own product. It is built by the Heaven Group, the same company as Heaven Green Energy, so treat this as a recommendation from its maker.