If you are choosing solar shading analysis software Germany installers actually trust in 2026, you are solving two problems at once, and only one of them is physics. The engineering problem is that Berlin sits near 52.5 degrees north, which puts the sun at roughly 14 degrees above the horizon at solar noon on 21 December, so a two metre chimney throws an eight metre shadow across the roof on the shortest day of the year. The commercial problem is that the German customer has been trained by fifteen years of PV*SOL to expect an animated Verschattungsanalyse on the kitchen table, and a spreadsheet loss figure will not close the deal. The tool that wins our 2026 bench is SurgePV at roughly €1,180 (US$1,299) per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, but it does not win the sales-artefact axis and we say so below. This ranking covers ten shading and irradiance tools, priced in euros, including dedicated instruments and horizon workflows rather than only design suites.
Direct answer. The best solar shading analysis software for Germany in 2026 is SurgePV, at about €1,180 per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, because it runs an 8,760-hour module-level shading simulation with bypass-diode physics on every paid plan and writes the result straight into string grouping, the VDE-labelled single-line diagram and the German-language Angebot. PV*SOL premium remains the better customer-facing Verschattungsanalyse, and PVsyst remains the named format where a Hausbank or a Sachverständiger reviews the yield.
This guide is written for Solarteure, Planungsbüros and EPC design teams whose yield numbers get challenged. It sits under our global pillar on solar shading analysis software and alongside the wider solar design software Germany ranking, which covers the full design workflow rather than shading alone.
Why the Verschattungsanalyse Is a Sales Document in Germany
In most markets a shading study is an internal engineering step. In Germany it is a deliverable the customer expects to see, and that difference changes which tool you buy.
Valentin Software has sold PVSOL out of Berlin since the 1990s, and its animated 3D shading walkthrough became the de facto standard demonstration in German residential selling. The customer watches a shadow sweep across their own Satteldach through a simulated year, sees the Gaube and the neighbour’s Linde tree eat the north-east corner, and understands why the array stops where it stops. That is not marketing fluff. It is a genuine competitive fact, it pre-empts the “why did you not fill the whole roof” objection, and it is the single strongest reason a German firm keeps PVSOL after buying something else. Our solar design software Germany page makes the same admission for the design category, and it applies with more force here, because shading visualisation is exactly where PV*SOL is strongest.
The expectation runs further than residential. On commercial work the Verschattungsanalyse turns up as a named annex in the Ertragsprognose, and on financed projects the reviewer is a Sachverständiger or a bank’s technical adviser rather than a homeowner. There the format that needs no introduction is a PVsyst near-shading study with its documented loss tree. A physically better simulation from an unfamiliar platform still invites a conversation nobody budgeted for.
📘 Regulation note
No German rule sets a mandatory shading factor the way the UK's MCS Standard Estimation Method does. There is no legally defined Verschattungsfaktor. What exists is contractual and commercial expectation: the customer expects the animation, the Netzbetreiber expects a VDE-AR-N 4105 compliant connection notification per the Bundesnetzagentur, and the lender expects a yield report whose shading assumptions can be audited. Do not tell a customer a shading study is legally required, because it is not.
There is a third practical driver. Since the Solarspitzengesetz took effect on 25 February 2025, feed-in during negative day-ahead price hours earns nothing on newly commissioned systems, which pushed German designs toward east-west layouts and self-consumption. East-west changes the shading question completely, and we come to that arithmetic next.
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 pricingThe 4x Shadow Rule at 52.5 Degrees North
Here is the arithmetic every German shading decision rests on, written out so you can check it rather than take it on trust.
Solar noon elevation on the winter solstice is 90 minus the site latitude minus the earth’s axial tilt of 23.44 degrees. Berlin sits at 52.5 degrees north, so the sun reaches 90 minus 52.5 minus 23.44, which is 14.06 degrees. Hamburg at 53.55 degrees gets 13.0 degrees. Munich at 48.14 degrees gets a comparatively generous 18.4 degrees. Those are the highest the sun climbs all day on 21 December.
Shadow length is object height divided by the tangent of the solar elevation. The tangent of 14.06 degrees is 0.2505, and one divided by 0.2505 is 3.99. So in Berlin, every object casts a December-noon shadow about four times its own height, and longer at every other hour of that day. A 2 m chimney reaches 8 m. A 1.2 m Attika parapet reaches 4.8 m. A 6 m neighbouring gable reaches 24 m, which is most of a small commercial roof.
Now the ground coverage ratio. Take a standard module 1.134 m across, mounted in horizontal orientation on a flat Berlin roof at 30 degrees facing south. Row height above the roof is 1.134 times the sine of 30 degrees, which is 0.567 m. That row casts a December-noon shadow of 0.567 times 4.0, which is 2.27 m. The row itself occupies 1.134 times the cosine of 30 degrees, which is 0.98 m of horizontal depth. Minimum pitch for zero shading at winter noon is therefore 2.27 plus 0.98, which is 3.25 m, and the ground coverage ratio is 1.134 divided by 3.25, which is 0.35.
A GCR of 0.35 means two thirds of the roof is empty air. On a leased Logistikhalle roof in Brandenburg that is an unacceptable answer, which is precisely why German flat-roof practice moved to east-west ballasted blocks at 10 to 15 degrees, where GCR runs above 0.7 and the December-noon constraint largely disappears because the ridge lines run north to south. The tradeoff moves to low-elevation morning and evening shading instead, and to the Eurocode DIN EN 1991-1-4 wind loading that decides the ballast.
Key takeaway. In Germany the shading tool has to answer two different questions depending on the roof. On a pitched Satteldach it is near-object shading from Gauben, Schornsteine and neighbouring trees. On a flat commercial roof it is a GCR optimisation against a 14 degree winter sun, and the honest answer is usually east-west rather than a sparse south field.
Top 10 Shading Analysis Tools in Germany Compared
Pricing is 2026, annualised, quoted in each vendor’s own billing currency. PVsyst bills in Swiss francs and PV*SOL in euros; US dollar products are shown in dollars, with any euro figure approximate at €0.91 per US dollar. Confirm with the vendor before it reaches a customer.
| # | Tool | Price, vendor currency | Shading capability | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | SurgePV | US$1,299/user/yr (~€1,180) | 8,760-hr module-level with bypass diodes, annual heatmap, AI 3D roof | Solarteure and EPCs at 5+ projects a month |
| 2 | PV*SOL premium | EUR 845 per named user per year plus VAT | Animated 3D Verschattungsanalyse, best customer-facing artefact | German residential selling and Planungsbüros |
| 3 | PVsyst | CHF 700/user/yr, annual subscription | Near-shading model plus horizon file, documented loss tree | Gutachter, Hausbank and Sachverständiger review |
| 4 | HelioScope | US$159/mo Basic, US$259/mo Pro | Module-level C&I simulation with a clean loss tree | Consultancies on large flat roofs |
| 5 | Scanifly | Not publicly listed | Drone photogrammetry to a measured 3D shading model | Dense tree canopy and complex Altbau roofs |
| 6 | Solmetric SunEye 210 | US$2,195 base, one-off | Measured fisheye horizon at a physical point on the roof | Disputes, audits and tree-heavy sites |
| 7 | Polysun | Not publicly listed | Shading inside a coupled PV and Wärmepumpe model | Sektorenkopplung and GEG-driven projects |
| 8 | Aurora Solar | US$135/user/mo Basic, US$220 Premium, billed annually | Strong residential shade rendering, gated on Premium | Multinationals already on Aurora |
| 9 | PVGIS and Meteonorm horizon import | PVGIS free; Meteonorm CHF 675 first licence, CHF 350 additional | Far-horizon terrain profile fed into another engine | Mittelgebirge and valley sites |
| 10 | Sunny Design | Free; Sunny Design PRO EUR 600/yr net | Simplified shading inside SMA string design | SMA-heavy Solarteure |
The honest read: positions 1 to 3 are the real choice for a German firm. Positions 5, 6 and 9 are not competitors to the others at all, they are measurement inputs that feed them, and a serious shading practice runs at least one of them. And on licence cost the two incumbents are cheaper than we are: five PV*SOL premium named users cost EUR 4,225 a year and five PVsyst seats CHF 3,500, against €5,900 for five SurgePV seats.
1. SurgePV
What it does best. SurgePV runs an 8,760-hour shading simulation at module level with bypass-diode physics on every paid plan, which matters because shade is non-linear and array-level averaging hides the loss that actually shows up on the meter. It builds the 3D roof and detects Schornsteine, Gauben, Dachfenster and neighbouring trees from satellite imagery in about a minute, so the first 20 minutes of manual tracing disappears. The output is an annual per-module irradiance-loss heatmap that feeds directly into string and MPPT grouping, so shaded modules land on their own input rather than dragging a 14 module string down every winter morning. For German work it labels the resulting single-line diagram to VDE-AR-N 4105 conventions and carries the shading loss into the Ertragsprognose and the German-language Angebot without a re-import.
Pricing. €1,180 (US$1,299) per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, so €5,900 for five seats. Individual seats about €1,730 per year. Free trial, no credit card.
Who it suits. Solarteur firms and EPCs designing five or more projects a month across pitched residential and flat-roof C&I, and anyone whose current shading answer is a PV*SOL run re-typed into a separate quoting tool.
Honest limitations. Four concrete ones, and in Germany the first is the one that costs deals. Its shading visualisation is accurate but static compared with PV*SOL’s animated Verschattungsanalyse walkthrough, and in a German living room the animation persuades where a heatmap informs. It cannot import a measured horizon file from a Solmetric SunEye or a fisheye photograph, so on a Schwarzwald or Alpine valley site with a real terrain horizon you are relying on modelled terrain rather than a measurement someone stood on the roof and took. It has no drone photogrammetry ingest, so a dense mature canopy is modelled from satellite rather than from a Scanifly point cloud. And on a financed project a Sachverständiger or Hausbank has never seen its report format, where a PVsyst near-shading output needs no explanation at all.
Book a SurgePV demo and bring a genuinely shaded German roof rather than a clean one, because a clean roof tells you nothing about a shading engine.
2. PV*SOL premium
What it does best. The animated 3D shading walkthrough is the benchmark, and it is not close. You place the Gaube, the chimney and the neighbour’s tree, then play the year and watch the shadow move across the array. German buyers have seen this presentation for a decade and a half and treat it as what a proper Verschattungsanalyse looks like. Underneath the animation the simulation is serious, the component database is deep on German-market hardware, and it handles the awkward hip, dormer and Kehle geometry of German housing stock with less fighting than most cloud tools.
Pricing. PVSOL premium is a named-user subscription rather than a perpetual licence: EUR 845 per named user per year plus VAT, with standard PVSOL at EUR 585. Five named users are EUR 4,225 a year, which is plainly cheaper than five SurgePV seats at €5,900. Licences purchased before 19 November 2024 remain usable indefinitely, but maintenance renewals on them ended on 1 October 2024, so a Planungsbüro sitting on an old perpetual licence is running frozen software rather than a bargain.
Who it suits. German residential selling, and Planungsbüros whose deliverable is a technical Ertragsprognose with a shading annex.
Honest limitations. Windows desktop only, so no live collaboration and nothing usable from a phone on a roof. No satellite-derived 3D roof capture, so every obstruction is placed by hand. Shading output does not flow into a sales-ready Angebot without rework in another tool. Our PV*SOL alternative guide covers where the switch does and does not pay.
3. PVsyst
What it does best. PVsyst is the reference. Its near-shading model, its separate far-horizon handling, its electrical shading loss treatment and its documented loss tree are what everything else is benchmarked against, including SurgePV. On a financed German project the technical adviser asks for a PVsyst report by name, and the shading section is the part they read first. On bankability specifically it beats SurgePV and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Heaven Designs published a walkthrough of how to read a PVsyst loss diagram if you need to defend one line by line.
Pricing. PVsyst bills in Swiss francs on an annual subscription, not a perpetual licence: CHF 700 per user per year for Professional, CHF 560 for Training and Research, CHF 420 for Education, CHF 25 for Student and Classroom, and CHF 3,000 for PVsystCLI. Group discounts run 5 to 20 percent by quantity. Five Professional seats are CHF 3,500 a year, less than five SurgePV seats at €5,900.
Who it suits. Gutachter, technical due diligence teams and Freiflächen developers.
Honest limitations. Windows desktop, a genuinely steep learning curve, no design workflow in the Solarteur sense, no proposal output and no VDE documentation. Building the 3D shading scene is slow manual work. See our PVsyst alternative comparison and the head to head on HelioScope versus PVsyst.
4. HelioScope
What it does best. Module-level 8,760-hour simulation for commercial roofs with a clean, exportable loss tree that German independent engineers accept without argument. On a 500 kWp Logistikhalle with east-west rows its handling of mutual row shading is good, and the report is quick to produce.
Pricing. HelioScope publishes US dollar prices: Basic US$159 a month or US$1,620 a year, Pro US$259 a month or US$2,640 a year, Enterprise quoted. Each seat covers one user and ten projects a month, with DC design capped at 1.25 MW on Basic, 5 MW on Pro and 30 MW on Enterprise, so a 500 kWp Logistikhalle fits inside Basic and a Freifläche does not. Five Basic seats are US$8,100 a year, roughly €7,371 at €0.91 per dollar.
Who it suits. Consultancies and C&I-only teams whose deliverable is a yield report.
Honest limitations. No German regulatory layer, no VDE labelling, no satellite 3D roof capture and no customer-facing shading animation at all. Obstruction modelling is coarser than PV*SOL on complex pitched roofs. Read our HelioScope alternative guide before committing five seats.
5. Scanifly
What it does best. Scanifly turns a drone flight into a photogrammetric 3D model of the actual site, trees and all, then runs shading against that measured geometry rather than an operator’s guess at tree height. On a mature Baumbestand next to an Altbau roof, that difference is worth more than any sky model refinement, because the dominant error in German residential shading estimates is a wrong tree height typed in by a designer standing on the ground.
Pricing. Scanifly does not publish pricing. The per-seat and per-project figures that circulate in software directories are unverified, so a quote from Scanifly is the only number worth planning against. See our Scanifly pricing breakdown.
Who it suits. Firms that already fly drones, and anyone whose shading disputes come down to vegetation.
Honest limitations. You need a drone, a pilot and permission to fly, which in Germany means the EU drone rules and often a Genehmigung in built-up areas. It is a capture and modelling tool, not a design suite or a financial model, so it sits alongside your main platform rather than replacing it. Our Scanifly alternative piece covers the workflow tradeoff.
6. Solmetric SunEye 210
What it does best. A handheld fisheye instrument that photographs the entire sky dome from a specific point on the roof and overlays the annual sun path, producing a measured horizon and a monthly solar access percentage for that exact spot. When a customer or an adjacent property owner disputes a shading claim, a measurement taken on the roof settles it in a way no simulation does. It remains the reference method for a shading audit.
Pricing. US$2,195 for the base kit in North America, a one-off instrument purchase that includes a lifetime PV Designer licence. Roughly €1,997 at €0.91 per dollar, before German import duty and VAT.
Who it suits. Sachverständige, audit teams and firms handling shading disputes or tree-removal negotiations with neighbours.
Honest limitations. The SunEye 210 is a current product, not a discontinued one, and Solmetric has been a Fluke company since the acquisition announced on 12 September 2023, so support is not the worry. Availability is: as of 2 August 2026 the unit is out of stock with a stated 10 to 12 week lead time, which does not fit a dispute that needs a reading next month. It measures one point, so a large roof needs several readings. It produces solar access percentages, not an energy model, so the output still has to be carried into a simulation engine.
7. Polysun
What it does best. Vela Solaris built Polysun around coupled systems, so shading loss lands in the same model as the Wärmepumpe, the storage and the hot water. With the Gebäudeenergiegesetz pushing heat pumps into most German renovation conversations, seeing how a shaded array changes the self-consumption fraction of a coupled system is genuinely useful.
Pricing. Vela Solaris does not publish Polysun pricing. It sells either a one-off purchase plus an annual service subscription or a lease with a twelve month minimum, both quoted. The EUR 699 figure that circulates in software directories traces back to a 2013 price list and should not be relied on.
Who it suits. Planungsbüros doing Sektorenkopplung and Sanierungsfahrpläne.
Honest limitations. Shading is a component of a larger simulation rather than the focus. The 3D obstruction editor is weaker than PV*SOL’s, there is no customer-facing animation and no sales document. If you never touch heat, it is the wrong purchase.
8. Aurora Solar
What it does best. Strong residential shade rendering with mature roof plane detection and a polished customer-facing presentation, plus LIDAR-backed irradiance where the data coverage exists.
Pricing. Aurora publishes US dollar prices: Basic US$135 per user per month billed annually and Premium US$220, about €123 and €200 at €0.91 per dollar. Five Basic seats are US$8,100 a year and five Premium seats US$13,200. LIDAR modelling and bankable shade reports sit on Premium, and plan sets are a separately priced service rather than a plan inclusion. Aurora Basic at US$1,620 a year is cheaper than a SurgePV Individual seat at US$1,899, which is worth stating plainly.
Who it suits. Multinational installers extending an existing Aurora process into Germany.
Honest limitations. LIDAR modelling and bankable shade reports are gated on Premium, which catches small firms who buy Basic and then upgrade mid-project. The German regulatory layer is thin, LIDAR coverage is far better in North America than in Germany, and per-seat monthly pricing scales painfully. See our Aurora Solar alternative comparison.
9. PVGIS and Meteonorm Horizon Import
What it does best. These are not design tools, they are horizon and irradiance inputs. The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre publishes PVGIS free, including a terrain horizon profile for any German coordinate, which imports straight into PVsyst or PV*SOL. Meteonorm sells a commercial dataset with finer horizon and irradiance modelling. On a Mittelgebirge or Alpine valley site the far horizon can cut winter yield more than every chimney on the roof combined, and a tool that assumes a flat horizon will simply miss it.
Pricing. PVGIS is free. Meteonorm publishes its own price in Swiss francs: CHF 675 for a first licence and CHF 350 for each additional licence, excluding VAT. It is bought once per software version rather than renewed annually, and version upgrades are priced separately.
Who it suits. Anyone designing in the Schwarzwald, the Harz, the Alpine foothills or a river valley.
Honest limitations. Terrain horizon only. Neither knows about the Gaube, the chimney or the neighbour’s tree, which is where most residential shading loss actually lives. They complement a near-shading engine rather than replacing it.
10. Sunny Design
What it does best. SMA’s planner applies a simplified shading assumption inside string and storage design, and it is fast at catching a configuration error before it reaches the roof. If most of your inverters are SMA, having the free tier open costs nothing.
Pricing. The standard version is free. Sunny Design PRO is EUR 600 a year net, contrary to several third-party software directories that describe PRO as free; SMA’s own product page is the authority.
Who it suits. SMA-heavy Solarteure doing residential and light commercial.
Honest limitations. It is a manufacturer tool built to configure that manufacturer’s hardware. Shading is simplified rather than modelled hour by hour, there is no 3D obstruction editor, no customer artefact and no lender-grade output. A useful second window, not a shading platform.
Get your sizing sanity-checked. For a fast independent second opinion on system size and payback before you finalise a shaded layout, run the numbers through our free solar calculator or talk to our engineering team.
The 4x Shadow Rule Test: Five Checks Before You Quote
This is the framework we run on our own solar EPC work before a shaded German design leaves the office. It takes about ten minutes and it catches most of what a Sachverständiger would find.
- Multiply every obstruction height by four. At Berlin latitude that is the December-noon shadow. Draw those shadows on the roof plan by hand before you open any software. If the drawing and the simulation disagree by more than about ten percent, one of them has the wrong object height.
- Check the far horizon separately from the near objects. Import a PVGIS horizon profile for the coordinate. In a valley the terrain can remove the first and last hour of winter production entirely, and no near-shading model will tell you.
- Confirm the sky model is anisotropic. Roughly half of annual global horizontal irradiance at a German site is diffuse, and an isotropic model assumes that diffuse light arrives equally from every direction. It does not, it concentrates near the solar disc and the horizon, so an isotropic model systematically misprices a partly shaded array. Perez or Hay-Davies, not isotropic.
- Run the loss at module level, not array level. A roof with 8 percent geometric shade routinely loses 15 to 22 percent of annual energy once bypass-diode and string mismatch effects are counted. Our shading loss glossary entry sets out the mechanism.
- Decide GCR against the actual layout, not a default. If the answer for south-facing 30 degree rows is a GCR of 0.35 and the customer wants the roof full, the honest recommendation is east-west at 10 to 15 degrees, with the Eurocode wind and ballast check that comes with it.
⚠️ Watch out
Do not quote the 4x figure outside winter. At Berlin's summer solstice the noon sun reaches about 61 degrees and the same chimney casts a shadow of roughly 0.55 times its height. The seasonal swing is a factor of seven, which is exactly why a single-point shade study is worthless at German latitudes and why the 8,760-hour run exists.
Mistakes German Solarteure Make in Shading Analysis
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1
Guessing tree height from the ground. A designer standing in a garden estimating a Linde at 8 m when it is 13 m has produced a wrong shading model, and the error grows every year the tree does. Measure it, or fly it.
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2
Forgetting the Attika on a flat roof. A 1.2 m parapet casts a 4.8 m December shadow along the south edge. On a 40 m roof that is 12 percent of the area losing most of its winter production, and it is the single most common omission we see in German C&I audits.
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3
Using an isotropic sky model. With about half of German annual irradiance arriving as diffuse light, an isotropic assumption misprices exactly the partly shaded modules whose value you are trying to establish.
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4
Stringing shaded and unshaded modules together. The shading run exists to drive MPPT grouping. If the heatmap does not change the string plan, you ran it for decoration.
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5
Promising a shading report is legally required. Germany has no mandated Verschattungsfaktor. Sell the analysis on accuracy and on the animation the customer expects, not on an invented regulation.
The wider set of process failures is covered in our writeup on common mistakes EPC companies make in rooftop solar.
Where PVsyst and PV*SOL Still Beat SurgePV
- ✓ Shading has to drive string grouping, SLD and Angebot in one licence
- ✓ You want the 3D roof and obstructions from satellite, not traced by hand
- ✓ You run flat-roof east-west GCR studies regularly
- ✓ Your designers and sales team need the same live project file
- ✗ The animated Verschattungsanalyse is what closes your deals (PV*SOL)
- ✗ A Hausbank or Sachverständiger reviews the yield (PVsyst)
- ✗ Your shading disputes hinge on tree geometry (Scanifly or SunEye)
- ✗ A valley terrain horizon dominates the site (PVGIS or Meteonorm)
Verdict. For a German firm running volume across pitched residential and flat-roof C&I, SurgePV wins on bundled scope and on the fact that the shading result actually changes the string plan and the quote. For a firm whose Verschattungsanalyse animation is a sales asset, or whose deliverable is a lender-reviewed Ertragsgutachten, PV*SOL and PVsyst keep their place, and a good number of German firms will end up running two tools rather than one.
How Heaven Green Energy and SurgePV Help German Teams
Heaven Green Energy has delivered more than 10,000 solar installations, and our engineering group builds the software our own designers use. SurgePV came out of that, written by people who had to defend a yield number to a customer who could see the tree from their kitchen window. For German teams the entry points are:
- Shadow analysis for the 8,760-hour module-level Verschattungsanalyse and the annual loss heatmap.
- Heaven Designs PVsyst resource centre when the deliverable has to be a PVsyst report rather than a proposal.
- Structural and civil engineering for the Eurocode DIN EN 1991-1-4 wind and ballast check that an east-west GCR decision triggers.
- Dual MPPT versus single MPPT for the inverter side of a shaded string plan.
If you run projects beyond Germany, our commercial solar and industrial solar pages set out how the same design stack carries across markets. Wider deployment context sits with the IEA renewables tracker, IRENA country profiles and pv magazine Deutschland.
Related Shading and Design Software Guides
- Solar Shading Analysis Software: The Global Guide
- Solar Shading Analysis Software in the Netherlands
- Solar Design Software Germany: Top 10 Tools Ranked
- Best Solar Proposal Software in Germany
- Best Solar Software in Germany: The Full Stack
- Best Solar Design Software: The Global Ranking
- PV Yield Simulation Software Compared
- Commercial Solar Design Software Compared
Shading Analysis in Nearby Markets
Germany, Poland and France share the central European winter sun angles that make inter-row spacing the binding constraint on flat roofs.
- Best solar shading analysis software in Poland
- Best solar shading analysis software in France
- Solar shading analysis software: the global guide
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best solar shading analysis software for Germany in 2026?
SurgePV ranks first, at about €1,180 per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, because it runs an 8,760-hour module-level shading simulation with bypass-diode physics on every paid plan and pushes the result straight into string grouping, the VDE-labelled single-line diagram and the German Angebot. PV*SOL premium ranks second and keeps a genuine advantage in the animated Verschattungsanalyse that German customers expect to see. PVsyst ranks third and remains the format a Hausbank or Sachverständiger asks for by name.
How long is a winter shadow in Germany?
At Berlin’s latitude of 52.5 degrees north, the sun reaches only about 14.1 degrees above the horizon at solar noon on 21 December, which is 90 minus 52.5 minus the earth’s 23.44 degree axial tilt. Shadow length is height divided by the tangent of that elevation, so every object casts a shadow about four times its own height. A 2 m chimney reaches 8 m. Hamburg at 53.55 degrees is slightly worse at 13.0 degrees, Munich at 48.14 degrees better at 18.4 degrees.
What ground coverage ratio does a German flat roof support?
For south-facing rows at 30 degrees using a 1.134 m module in horizontal orientation, the row stands 0.567 m high, casts a 2.27 m December-noon shadow in Berlin and occupies 0.98 m of horizontal depth, giving a minimum pitch of 3.25 m and a ground coverage ratio of about 0.35. Two thirds of the roof stays empty. That arithmetic is why German flat-roof practice moved to east-west ballasted blocks at 10 to 15 degrees, where GCR runs above 0.7.
Is a Verschattungsanalyse legally required in Germany?
No. Germany has no mandated shading factor equivalent to the UK’s MCS Standard Estimation Method, and there is no legally defined Verschattungsfaktor. The requirement is commercial and contractual instead. German customers expect an animated shading walkthrough as part of the sale, commercial Ertragsprognosen carry a shading annex, and financed projects are reviewed by a Sachverständiger or a bank’s technical adviser who will audit the shading assumptions. Do not tell a customer it is a legal obligation.
Why does the sky model matter for shading in Germany?
Roughly half of annual global horizontal irradiance at a German site arrives as diffuse light rather than direct beam, according to JRC PVGIS climate data. An isotropic sky model assumes diffuse light arrives equally from all directions, which is wrong: it concentrates near the solar disc and near the horizon. A partly shaded module still receives most of the sky dome, so an isotropic model misprices it in both directions depending on geometry. Use a Perez or Hay-Davies anisotropic model.
Does SurgePV replace PVsyst for a German bank report?
Not yet, and we would say so on a sales call. SurgePV launched in 2025, so a Sachverständiger or a Hausbank technical adviser reviewing a financed commercial project has never seen its report format, where a PVsyst near-shading study and loss diagram need no introduction. The physics is comparable. The recognition is not. Firms doing financed commercial work commonly run SurgePV for design and quoting and keep a PVsyst licence for the Ertragsgutachten.
Do I need a drone or a SunEye for German shading work?
Only for specific problems. The dominant error in German residential shading is a wrong tree height estimated from the ground, and drone photogrammetry through Scanifly or a measured fisheye reading from a Solmetric SunEye 210 fixes exactly that. For a clean suburban roof with a chimney and a dormer, satellite-derived 3D modelling is enough. Budget the measurement tool for disputes, audits, mature vegetation and any site where the shading claim will be challenged.
How much energy does 8 percent geometric shade actually cost?
Considerably more than 8 percent. Once bypass-diode behaviour and string mismatch are counted, a roof with 8 percent measured geometric shade typically loses 15 to 22 percent of annual energy. Shade is non-linear, because a shaded cell drags its whole sub-string until the bypass diode activates, and the diode itself removes a third of the module. That non-linearity is the entire reason module-level 8,760-hour simulation exists rather than a percentage subtracted from gross irradiance.
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.