Best Solar Shading Analysis Software in India 2026

If you are choosing solar shading analysis software in India, the first thing to unlearn is the row spacing rule you inherited from a European or North American reference design. India sits between roughly 8 and 35 degrees north. The December sun here is high, the shadows are short, and inter-row self-shading, which is the loss that dominates design in Germany or Canada, is a comparatively minor line item on an Indian rooftop. What actually eats yield here is near-object shading from water tanks, stair-head rooms, parapets, cable trays and the building that went up next door last year, plus a soiling problem that gets misfiled as shading on a routine basis. Across 200+ MW installed at Heaven Green Energy, our design team runs SurgePV at about Rs 1.07 lakh (US$1,299) per user per year, and this guide ranks ten shading tools in rupees with the arithmetic that justifies the ranking.

Direct answer. The best solar shading analysis software in India for 2026 is SurgePV, at about Rs 1.07 lakh (US$1,299) per user per year on the 5-User Team plan. It runs an 8,760-hour module-level shading engine with bypass-diode physics, builds obstruction geometry from satellite imagery in under 60 seconds, and separates shading loss from soiling loss in the loss tree. PVsyst still wins on lender-named bankability at utility scale.

This guide is for Indian designers and EPC engineers whose yield numbers are being challenged, either by a customer in month three or by a lender in due diligence. It gives the sun-angle arithmetic first, then the tool ranking, then the mistakes we keep finding in third-party shading reports.

Why the High-Latitude Shading Playbook Fails in India

Shading analysis is physics, and the physics does not change at a border. What changes is which term dominates. At high latitude the December sun sits so low that a tilted row throws a shadow several times its own height, so row pitch and the ground coverage ratio decide the design before anything else does. At Indian latitudes that term collapses and the near-object term takes over.

Start with December solar noon elevation, which is simply 90 degrees minus latitude minus 23.44 degrees of declination:

Shadow length is the height of the obstruction divided by the tangent of the sun’s elevation. At 38 degrees, tan is 0.781, so every metre of array height casts 1.28 m of shadow at Delhi’s December noon. At Chennai’s 53 degrees, tan is 1.35, so a metre casts 0.74 m. At Berlin’s 14 degrees, tan is 0.25, so a metre casts 4.0 m. That single ratio is the whole inversion. A Berlin designer who spaces rows badly loses a third of the winter yield. A Chennai designer who copies Berlin spacing loses a third of the roof.

The consequence for tool selection is specific. A shading engine that is excellent at inter-row geometry and mediocre at near-object geometry is a good European tool and a poor Indian one. Ask any vendor to demonstrate on a real Indian rooftop with a mumty and a water tank, not on their showcase file. The pillar guide on solar shading analysis software covers the engine mechanics that apply everywhere; this page covers what changes at 13 to 29 degrees north.

Inter-Row Spacing: What Delhi and Chennai Sun Angles Actually Allow

Solar noon is the friendly case. Real spacing rules protect a design window, conventionally 9 am to 3 pm solar time on 21 December, because the sun is both lower and further round to the east or west at 9 am. The row-direction shadow at the design hour is the obstruction height divided by tan(elevation), multiplied by the cosine of the sun’s azimuth measured from due south.

Running that for 21 December at 9 am solar time:

Location	Latitude	Dec noon elevation	9 am elevation	9 am azimuth from south	Shadow per 1 m of array height (9 am)
Chennai	13.1N	53°	32.8°	50.5°	0.99 m
Mumbai	19.1N	47°	28.5°	47°	1.26 m
Ahmedabad	23.0N	44°	26°	46°	1.42 m
Delhi	28.6N	38°	22.3°	44.5°	1.74 m
Berlin	52.5N	14°	sun barely risen	not usable	4.0 m at noon

Now put a module on it. A standard 2.28 m module in portrait at 20 degrees tilt has a vertical rise of 2.28 x sin(20) = 0.78 m and a horizontal base of 2.14 m. Minimum pitch is base plus shadow:

• Chennai: 2.14 + (0.78 x 0.99) = 2.91 m pitch, ground coverage ratio 0.78
• Delhi: 2.14 + (0.78 x 1.74) = 3.50 m pitch, ground coverage ratio 0.65
• Berlin equivalent: 2.14 + (0.78 x 4.0) = 5.26 m pitch, ground coverage ratio 0.43

On a 40 m deep flat roof that is 7 rows at Berlin pitch, 11 rows at Delhi pitch, and 13 rows at Chennai pitch. An Ahmedabad EPC who copied a European template just left 57 percent of the possible capacity on the table, and told the customer the roof was full. At the 10 degree tilt most Indian flat RCC roofs actually use, the rise drops to 0.40 m and the Delhi pitch falls to about 2.93 m, which is tighter still.

Two caveats worth stating so nobody over-corrects. First, tighter pitch raises module operating temperature because airflow between rows drops, and Indian rooftops already run 25 to 30 degrees above ambient. That interacts with cell technology, which we covered in the TOPCon versus mono PERC heat comparison. Second, maintenance access is a real constraint: a 2.9 m pitch on a roof that needs weekly cleaning during the pre-monsoon dust season is a false economy. Set pitch from geometry, then add access, not the other way round. The tilt angle and azimuth definitions cover the underlying terms.

Near-Object Shading Is the Real Indian Problem

Here is the same arithmetic pointed at what actually sits on an Indian roof. Take a 3 m tall mumty, the stair-head room that caps almost every RCC building in north and west India. At Delhi’s December noon it throws a shadow 3 / 0.781 = 3.84 m to the north. At 9 am it throws 3 / tan(22.3) = 7.3 m, angled to the west-north-west. The mumty’s noon shadow alone is longer than the entire inter-row pitch requirement for the same roof.

Common Indian roof obstructions and their Delhi December noon shadows:

Obstruction	Typical height above roof	Dec noon shadow (Delhi)	Dec 9 am shadow (Delhi)
Parapet wall	1.0 m	1.28 m	2.44 m
Overhead water tank on stand	3.0 m	3.84 m	7.32 m
Mumty / stair-head room	3.0 m	3.84 m	7.32 m
Lift machine room	2.5 m	3.20 m	6.10 m
Cable tray on stanchions	0.6 m	0.77 m	1.46 m
Adjacent 4-storey construction	12 m	15.4 m	29.3 m

The last row is the one that ruins projects. Indian urban plots are dense and vertical construction is continuous, so a rooftop that is clear today can be shaded in three years. A shading model built only on today’s satellite tile is a snapshot, not a 25-year asset assumption. We now ask for the plot-adjacent building height permitted under the local development control rules and model the worst permitted case as a second scenario. It has changed the recommended array position on roughly one in six urban C&I sites we have surveyed.

AI obstruction detection needs human review on Indian roofs, and we say that plainly. Automatic detection from satellite imagery works well on the flat, clean, well-imaged roofs it was mostly trained on. Indian rooftops are cluttered, partially covered with tarpaulin and shade nets, carry water tanks that read as low-contrast blobs, and are frequently imaged at an oblique angle that hides the mumty behind its own shadow. The India design software guide makes the same point about roof AI and it is worth carrying through: treat auto-detection as a first pass that saves 20 minutes, then walk the model against site photographs and correct heights manually. Our own error log across partner projects shows tank and mumty heights are the two most commonly wrong inputs, and both are usually understated.

The Shade-or-Soil Test: Is It Really Shading?

This is our named framework, and it is the correction we make most often on Indian projects. A large share of what Indian EPCs record as shading loss is soiling loss, and the two need opposite fixes. Re-stringing an array to solve a dust problem wastes money and fixes nothing.

Run these four checks before you accept a shading diagnosis:

1. Spatial signature. Shading is non-uniform and geometric: a corner, an edge row, a wedge pointing away from an obstruction. Soiling is broadly uniform across the array, with a mild gradient toward the lower edge of each module where dust and water collect. Pull module-level or string-level data and look at the map before looking at the total.
2. Time-of-day signature. Shading loss clusters into a fixed window that shifts slowly across the year. Soiling loss is flat across the daylight curve and simply scales the whole day down. Overlay two clear days a month apart.
3. Rain response. The single cleanest test in India. Soiling losses drop sharply after the first heavy monsoon rain, typically recovering most of the deficit within a day. Shading losses do not move at all. If your performance ratio jumps in the last week of June and holds, you had a dust problem.
4. Seasonal shape. Soiling in the Indo-Gangetic plain, Gujarat and Rajasthan builds through the dry pre-monsoon months and can run 5 to 12 percent annually without a cleaning schedule, worse near cement, ceramic or stone-crushing clusters. Shading loss peaks in December when the sun is lowest. If your loss peaks in May, it is dust.

Verdict. If the loss is uniform, flat across the day, and recovers after rain, it is soiling and the fix is a cleaning schedule, not a re-design. Our guide to solar panel cleaning frequency in India sets the intervals we use by region.

The tool implication: a shading platform that lets you set a soiling profile independently, with a monsoon reset, is doing engineering. One that folds a flat global soiling default into the shading number is producing a figure you cannot defend when the customer’s generation report disagrees. Shading loss and soiling loss belong on separate lines of the loss tree.

The 5-Point India Shading Bench Test

This is the framework we score every shading tool on before deploying it on our own solar EPC work. Five axes, ten points each, out of 50. We do not deploy below 38.

1. Near-object geometry. Can you place arbitrary 3D obstructions with real heights, including a mumty, a tank on a stand, a parapet and an adjacent building of specified height? Does it model the growth of adjacent construction as a scenario?
2. Module-level physics. True 8,760-hour simulation at module level with bypass-diode behaviour, not an array-level average shade percentage. Partial shade on one cell must not linearly scale the whole string.
3. Sky model quality. Anisotropic sky handling (Perez or Hay-Davies) rather than isotropic, because a module with a restricted sky view under a monsoon overcast is mispriced by an isotropic assumption. See the diffuse horizontal irradiance definition for the underlying term.
4. Loss separation. Shading, soiling, temperature and mismatch reported as separate lines with independently editable assumptions.
5. Cost per finished shading study in rupees, including add-ons and the time to build the obstruction scene.

Scores across the ten tools below: SurgePV 45, PVsyst 44, HelioScope 40, Aurora Solar 38, PV*SOL Premium 39, The Solar Labs 30, Arka360 32, Solmetric SunEye 33, Scanifly 34, SketchUp shadow study 22. Aurora and Arka360 both score a point higher than they did in our previous pass, because both are cheaper than we had them: Aurora’s entry plan is US$135 per user per month rather than the US$219 we had used, and Arka360’s entry plan is ₹46,000 a year rather than ₹84,000. The scoring is ours and it is opinionated. PVsyst sits one point behind and beats SurgePV outright on axis two and on lender acceptance.

Top 10 Solar Shading Analysis Software in India Compared

Pricing is 2026, annualised where possible, quoted in each vendor’s own billing currency. PVsyst bills in Swiss francs, PV*SOL in euros, Aurora, HelioScope, Scanifly, Solmetric and SurgePV in US dollars, and Arka360 in rupees. Where a rupee figure follows a dollar price it is approximate at Rs 83 per dollar and moves with the exchange rate.

#	Tool	Price, vendor currency	Shading capability	Best for
1	SurgePV	US$1,299/user/yr (~Rs 1.07 L)	8,760-hr module-level, AI obstruction scene, annual heatmap	EPCs running shading on every quote
2	PVsyst	CHF 700/user/yr, annual subscription	Reference near-shading 3D scene and loss diagram	Lender due diligence, utility scale
3	HelioScope	US$159/mo or US$1,620/yr Basic; US$259/mo or US$2,640/yr Pro	Module-level C&I yield with clean loss tree	Consultancies delivering yield reports
4	PV*SOL Premium	EUR 845 per named user per year plus VAT	3D shading animation with visual shade frequency	Designers who must show shading to a client
5	Aurora Solar	US$135/user/mo Basic, US$220 Premium, billed annually	Irradiance maps, with LIDAR and bankable shade reports on Premium	Teams also serving US clients
6	Scanifly	Not publicly listed	Drone photogrammetry as-built obstruction capture	Congested industrial roofs
7	Solmetric SunEye 210	US$2,195 base, one-off, plus Indian import duty	On-roof skyline measurement, no modelling assumption	Disputed sites and audit evidence
8	Arka360	₹46,000 Lite, ₹70,000 Basic, ₹1,00,000 Premium per year, all +18% GST	India-native residential shading and proposals	Single-state residential shops
9	The Solar Labs	Sits under Arka360; no separate price list	Fast residential shaded layouts	High-volume PM Surya Ghar sellers
10	SketchUp shadow study	~Rs 30,000/yr for SketchUp Pro	Geometric shadow visualisation only, no yield	Architects and quick mumty checks

Two of those licences are cheaper than ours, and there is no point dressing it up: PVsyst is CHF 700 per user per year, so CHF 3,500 for five seats, and PV*SOL Premium is EUR 845 per named user per year, so EUR 4,225 for five, against US$6,495 for five SurgePV seats. Aurora Basic at US$1,620 a year also undercuts a SurgePV Individual seat at US$1,899.

Positions 1 to 5 are genuine shading engines. Positions 6 and 7 are capture and measurement instruments that feed an engine rather than replacing one. Positions 8 and 9 are Indian design platforms whose shading is adequate for residential and thin for commercial. Position 10 is a drawing tool and it is on the list only because Indian consultants genuinely use it for a fast mumty shadow check, which is a legitimate use and not an engineering deliverable.

1. SurgePV

What it does best for shading in India. SurgePV runs a true 8,760-hour, module-level shading simulation with bypass-diode physics on every paid plan, with no add-on tier gating it. For Indian roofs the useful parts are the obstruction workflow and the loss separation. You enter an address, the AI builds a 3D roof from satellite imagery in under 60 seconds and proposes obstruction objects, and you then correct heights by hand, which on an Indian roof you will. Arbitrary objects can be added with explicit heights, so a 3 m mumty, a tank on a 1.5 m stand and a permitted 12 m adjacent building all go in as separate scenarios. Sky-diffuse modelling is anisotropic. Soiling sits on its own line with a monsoon reset rather than being folded into the shading figure. The annual heatmap colours every module by percent irradiance loss, which is what actually drives the re-stringing decision and the MPPT grouping. Residential runs finish in under 30 seconds, a 1 MW industrial roof in under 5 minutes.

Pricing. Rs 1.07 lakh (US$1,299) per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, so Rs 5.35 lakh for five seats. Individual seats about Rs 1.57 lakh (US$1,899). Free trial, no credit card.

Who it suits. Indian EPCs and installers who want a shading study attached to every quote rather than only on the projects that go to a lender.

Honest limitations. Four concrete ones. Utility-scale single-axis tracker shading is still maturing, so a 50 MW Rajasthan tracker project should still be cross-checked in PVsyst before it goes to IREDA. The platform is cloud-only, which is a real problem on a site visit in a Morbi industrial estate with no usable mobile data, where PV*SOL and PVsyst run offline on a laptop. It does no drone capture, so a roof with undocumented obstructions still needs Scanifly or a manual survey upstream. And brand recognition is thin: SurgePV launched in 2025, so a conservative lender who has read PVsyst loss diagrams for a decade will ask an extra question about provenance that PVsyst does not attract.

Book a SurgePV demo and bring a real Indian roof with a mumty, a tank and a parapet, so you can judge the obstruction handling on clutter rather than on a clean showcase file.

2. PVsyst

What it does best. PVsyst remains the reference. Its near-shading 3D scene editor is the most complete implementation of obstruction geometry in the industry, its shading loss factor tables are documented well enough to argue from in a due diligence meeting, and the loss diagram is the artefact Indian banks and IREDA name by request. On the axis that matters most to a lender, PVsyst beats SurgePV and we say so.

Pricing. PVsyst bills in Swiss francs on an annual subscription rather than a perpetual licence: CHF 700 per user per year for Professional, billed in francs so the rupee cost moves with the exchange rate on the day you pay. Education is CHF 420, Training and Research CHF 560, Student and Classroom CHF 25, and PVsystCLI CHF 3,000. Group discounts run 5 to 20 percent by quantity, so five Professional seats are CHF 3,500 a year before discount, which is cheaper than five SurgePV seats.

Who it suits. Independent engineers, technical due diligence teams and utility-scale developers.

Honest limitations. Building the 3D near-shading scene by hand is slow, commonly an hour or more for a cluttered rooftop that SurgePV proposes in a minute. Desktop-only and Windows-first. No proposal output, no customer-facing heatmap, no Indian regulatory logic. Our engineering group’s guide to reading a PVsyst loss diagram is the fastest way to learn what the output is telling you.

3. HelioScope

What it does best. Module-level 8,760-hour simulation with a clean, readable loss tree that separates shading from soiling, mismatch and thermal losses. For a 2 MW warehouse roof in Chennai or Pune, a HelioScope report is accepted by Indian technical reviewers without argument.

Pricing. US$159 per user per month, or US$1,620 a year on annual billing, for Basic; Pro is US$259 a month or US$2,640 a year. Each seat covers one user and ten projects a month, with DC design capped at 1.25 MW on Basic and 5 MW on Pro. Five Basic seats billed annually are US$8,100, roughly Rs 6.7 lakh at Rs 83 per dollar.

Who it suits. Engineering consultancies whose deliverable is a yield report rather than a homeowner proposal.

Honest limitations. Obstruction modelling is functional but manual, and it has no AI roof build, so a cluttered Indian roof takes real drafting time. No proposal tooling, no PM Surya Ghar or DISCOM logic, and per-seat monthly pricing scales badly on a growing Indian team.

4. PV*SOL Premium

What it does best. The 3D shading animation is the best client-facing shading artefact on the market. It renders shadow movement across the array through the day and the year, and produces a per-module shade frequency visual that a factory owner understands instantly. On a disputed site where the customer insists the neighbour’s building is not a problem, this ends the argument.

Pricing. PVSOL Premium is not a perpetual licence any more. Valentin Software sells it as a named-user subscription at 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 cheaper than five SurgePV seats and worth saying plainly. Licences bought before 19 November 2024 remain usable indefinitely, but maintenance renewals on them ended on 1 October 2024, so an old Indian perpetual licence is frozen software rather than a saving.

Who it suits. Designers who have to persuade a client, and teams that need offline capability.

Honest limitations. Desktop and Windows-only, a dated interface, a smaller Indian component library, and no workflow past the simulation. Building the 3D scene is manual. Support hours do not align well with Indian working days.

5. Aurora Solar

What it does best. Aurora’s irradiance mapping and shade engine are strong, and its LIDAR-backed roof detection is excellent where LIDAR coverage exists. If your Indian team does design outsourcing for US installers, Aurora fluency is a commercial asset independent of its technical merits.

Pricing. Aurora publishes two per-user plans: Basic at US$135 per user per month billed annually (US$159 month to month) and Premium at US$220 billed annually (US$259 month to month), plus a quoted Enterprise tier. Each covers one user and 50 projects a month. That is roughly Rs 11,200 and Rs 18,300 per seat per month at Rs 83 per dollar. LIDAR modelling, bankable shade reports and battery modelling sit on Premium, and plan sets are a separately priced service rather than a plan inclusion. The old Grow, Scale and Run tiers no longer exist. Aurora Basic at US$1,620 a year is cheaper than a SurgePV Individual seat at US$1,899.

Honest limitations. LIDAR coverage in India is effectively absent outside a few pilot areas, so the feature that makes Aurora excellent in California does nothing in Nashik. Its roof AI is trained on US satellite tiles and struggles with sloped RCC, parapets, tarpaulin covers and dish-antenna clutter. LIDAR modelling and bankable shade reports are gated on the Premium plan, which catches small teams who buy Basic and upgrade mid-project.

6. Scanifly

What it does best. Drone photogrammetry that turns a five-minute flight into an accurate as-built 3D site model with every obstruction where it actually is, at its actual height. On a congested Morbi ceramic-cluster roof or a multi-level Mumbai building, this removes the single largest source of Indian shading error, which is a guessed obstruction height.

Pricing. Scanifly does not publish pricing. The per-seat and per-project figures that circulate in software directories, including ones this site has carried in the past, are unverified, so a direct quote is the only number worth budgeting against, and the drone, pilot and Digital Sky permissions are separate costs on top.

Honest limitations. It is a capture tool, not a simulation engine, so you still export into something that runs the 8,760-hour physics. Indian drone rules under the Digital Sky framework add permission overhead that installers routinely underestimate, and much of urban Delhi and Mumbai sits in restricted airspace where a flight is simply not available.

7. Solmetric SunEye 210

What it does best. The SunEye is a handheld fisheye skyline instrument. You stand at a point on the roof, take one capture, and it returns the measured sky obstruction and monthly solar access percentage for that exact position. There is no modelling assumption in the answer, which makes it the strongest evidence available when a shading number is disputed after commissioning.

Pricing. US$2,195 for the base kit in North America, roughly Rs 1.82 lakh at Rs 83 per dollar, before Indian import duty and GST. It is capital equipment rather than a subscription, and the price includes a lifetime PV Designer licence.

Honest limitations. Availability, first: the SunEye 210 is a current product and not a discontinued one, but as of 2 August 2026 it is out of stock with a stated 10 to 12 week lead time, and an Indian buyer should add shipping and customs clearance on top of that. It measures points, not arrays, so a large roof needs many captures and interpolation between them. It cannot model a building that has not been built yet, which is the specific Indian risk that matters. Physical access to the roof is required, and units in India need servicing routed abroad through Solmetric, a Fluke company since the acquisition announced on 12 September 2023. Treat it as an audit instrument, not a design tool.

8. Arka360

What it does best. India-built, with residential shading that is adequate for a 3 kW to 10 kW rooftop, PM Surya Ghar awareness and support staff who answer during Indian working hours and already know what a mumty is. Cheaper per seat than SurgePV, and for a single-state residential shop that gap is real.

Pricing. Arka360 publishes Indian rupee plans: Lite ₹46,000 a year, Basic ₹70,000 and Premium ₹1,00,000, all plus 18 percent GST, with a one-time onboarding fee of ₹10,000. SLD and SketchUp export are gated to Premium, and no India plan includes e-signature.

Honest limitations. The shading output is not the bankable module-level simulation a lender expects on commercial project finance, so C&I work needs a second tool. Obstruction geometry is simpler than PVsyst or SurgePV, and complex multi-level roofs are handled coarsely.

9. The Solar Labs

What it does best. Throughput. The Solar Labs turns an address into a presentable shaded layout and a proposal quickly, which is what a high-volume PM Surya Ghar sales motion needs when a rep is handling twenty enquiries a week.

Pricing. The Solar Labs brand sits under Arka360 and does not publish a separate price list of its own, so treat the Arka360 India plans above as the reference and ask for a written quote. We are not going to describe this as a completed rebrand, because no formal rebrand announcement exists and no shared legal entity name could be sourced.

Honest limitations. Shading is a sales-grade output rather than an engineering one. Commercial and ground-mount capability is limited, the tool assumes a fairly standard rooftop, and it will not carry a disputed yield claim. For the wider design comparison see our solar design software India ranking.

10. SketchUp Shadow Study

What it does best. SketchUp’s shadow tool with correct latitude and date settings gives an architect or a junior engineer a quick, visual answer to one question: where does that mumty’s shadow fall in December? It costs little, everybody can drive it, and it is genuinely useful at the concept stage.

Pricing. About Rs 30,000 a year for SketchUp Pro.

Honest limitations. It produces geometry, not energy. There is no irradiance model, no diffuse sky, no bypass-diode behaviour and no kWh output, so it can tell you a module is shaded but not what that costs. Never submit a SketchUp shadow image as a shading analysis.

Get your shading numbers sanity-checked. For an independent second opinion on a disputed yield or shading claim before it reaches your customer, talk to our engineering team or run the sizing through our free solar calculator.

Is a Shading Report Required in India?

Plainly: no statutory requirement exists. Unlike the UK’s MCS Standard Estimation Method, which defines a shading factor as part of a regulated calculation, India has no scheme rule that mandates a shading study for a rooftop system. The MNRE framework for PM Surya Ghar requires ALMM-listed modules, a registered vendor and DISCOM feasibility, not a shading report. We are not going to invent a requirement that does not exist.

What does exist is contractual and commercial pressure, and it is growing:

• Lender due diligence. IREDA and private banks financing commercial and utility projects ask for P50, P75 and P90 yield bands from a recognised engine, and shading is an explicit line in that loss tree. This is where PVsyst’s name recognition still carries weight.
• Performance guarantees. Any EPC contract with a generation guarantee makes the shading assumption the thing you are guaranteeing against. We attach the shading heatmap to the contract for exactly this reason.
• RESCO and PPA structures. Where the developer owns the asset and sells power, the shading assumption is the revenue model. Our explainer on how solar PPAs and RESCOs work in India covers the structures.
• Consumer disputes. The commonest reason an Indian residential customer complains in month three is a generation shortfall, and a documented shading study is the difference between a conversation and a refund.

Grid and capacity context for these arguments sits with the Central Electricity Authority, and market-level reporting with Mercom India, the IEA and IRENA.

Mistakes Indian Designers Make in Shading Analysis

1. 1
   Inheriting European row pitch. A 5.2 m pitch in Chennai where 2.9 m is correct costs the customer roughly a third of the roof, and the proposal never mentions it because the loss is invisible.
2. 2
   Accepting AI-detected obstruction heights without review. Water tank and mumty heights are the two inputs most often wrong in the models we audit, and both are usually understated.
3. 3
   Ignoring the plot next door. A clear roof today can sit behind a permitted four-storey wall in three years. Model the worst permitted adjacent height as a second scenario before you fix the array position.
4. 4
   Recording soiling as shading. Run the Shade-or-Soil Test first. Re-stringing an array to fix a dust problem spends money and changes nothing.
5. 5
   Running array-level averages instead of module level. Shade is non-linear. An 8 percent shaded area can cost 15 to 22 percent of annual energy once bypass diodes and string mismatch are accounted for.
6. 6
   Grouping shaded and unshaded modules on the same MPPT. The heatmap exists to prevent this. Shaded modules belong on their own tracker input.

Should an Indian Team Standardise on SurgePV for Shading?

How Heaven Green Energy Helps

Heaven Green Energy is a Gujarat-based EPC with more than 200 MW installed across residential, commercial and industrial segments, and our engineering group builds the software we use. Every proposal we issue carries a shading heatmap and a separately stated soiling assumption tied to a cleaning schedule, because those two numbers are what customers challenge. For Indian teams and buyers the entry points are:

• Residential Solar: 1 to 10 kW rooftop systems with PM Surya Ghar handled end to end and a shading study included.
• Commercial Solar: 10 to 100 kW with module-level shading analysis suitable for lender submission.
• Industrial Solar EPC: 100 kW+ turnkey projects with performance guarantees underwritten by the shading model.
• Solar Calculator: sizing, subsidy and 25-year savings in 60 seconds.

For the shading engine itself, see the SurgePV shadow analysis module. For the string-level consequence of a shading map, QBits Energy on dual versus single MPPT covers why shaded modules need their own tracker input, and Heaven Designs’ PVsyst resource centre covers the bankable report side.

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Shading Analysis in Nearby Markets

India spans both the tropical diffuse-sky problem and the dusty high-irradiance conditions of the Gulf, so both comparisons apply depending on where you build.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best solar shading analysis software in India in 2026?

SurgePV ranks first on our 5-point India shading bench with 45 of 50, at about Rs 1.07 lakh per user per year on the 5-User Team plan. It runs 8,760-hour module-level simulation with bypass-diode physics, builds the obstruction scene from satellite imagery in under a minute, keeps soiling on a separate loss line, and exports an annual per-module heatmap. PVsyst scores 44 and remains the stronger choice where a lender names the tool.

How much row spacing does a rooftop solar array need in India?

Far less than European templates assume. At Delhi’s 28.6N the December solar noon elevation is about 38 degrees, so a 2.28 m module at 20 degrees tilt needs roughly 3.50 m of pitch to stay clear through a 9 am to 3 pm design window. At Chennai’s 13.1N the same module needs about 2.91 m. The equivalent Berlin figure is about 5.26 m. Copying the European number costs an Indian roof 30 to 50 percent of its capacity.

Why is near-object shading more important than inter-row shading in India?

Because the sun is high. At Indian latitudes a metre of array height casts 0.74 to 1.3 m of shadow at December noon, against about 4 m in northern Europe, so rows stop shading each other quickly. Fixed rooftop objects do not shrink with latitude: a 3 m mumty still throws a 3.84 m noon shadow in Delhi, which is longer than the entire row pitch requirement. The dominant loss moves from geometry between rows to geometry around obstructions.

How do I tell shading loss apart from soiling loss?

Run four checks. Shading is spatially non-uniform, clusters into a fixed daily time window, does not respond to rain, and peaks in December. Soiling is broadly uniform across the array, flat across the daylight curve, drops sharply after the first heavy monsoon rain, and peaks in the dry pre-monsoon months. If your performance ratio jumps in late June and holds, you had a dust problem, and re-stringing the array would have fixed nothing.

Can AI obstruction detection be trusted on Indian rooftops?

Not without human review. Automatic detection from satellite imagery handles clean, well-imaged roofs well, but Indian rooftops carry water tanks, mumty stair-head rooms, tarpaulins, shade nets, dish antennas and cable trays that read poorly at typical satellite resolution and oblique angles. In the models we audit, tank and mumty heights are the two most commonly wrong inputs and both tend to be understated. Use auto-detection as a first pass, then correct against site photographs.

Is a shading report legally required for solar in India?

No. There is no statutory or scheme-level requirement, unlike the UK where the MCS Standard Estimation Method defines a shading factor. MNRE’s PM Surya Ghar rules cover ALMM listing, vendor registration and DISCOM feasibility, not shading. The pressure is contractual instead: lenders such as IREDA want shading as an explicit line in a P50, P75 and P90 loss tree, and any generation guarantee makes the shading assumption the thing you are underwriting.

Does shading analysis need to account for buildings that have not been built yet?

On urban Indian sites, yes. Plot density and continuous vertical construction mean a clear roof can sit behind a new four-storey structure within a few years, and a 12 m wall casts a 15.4 m shadow at Delhi’s December noon. We model the worst adjacent height permitted under the local development control rules as a second scenario. It has changed the recommended array position on roughly one in six urban commercial sites we have surveyed.

How much does a shading study cost with Indian tools?

The engine is usually bundled rather than priced separately, and most vendors bill in their own currency rather than in rupees. SurgePV includes shading on every paid plan at US$1,299 per user per year, about Rs 1.07 lakh. PVsyst is CHF 700 per user per year on an annual subscription, HelioScope US$159 per user per month or US$1,620 a year on Basic, PV*SOL Premium EUR 845 per named user per year plus VAT rather than a perpetual licence, and Aurora US$135 per user per month on Basic billed annually. Arka360 publishes Indian pricing at ₹46,000 to ₹1,00,000 a year plus 18 percent GST. Scanifly does not publish pricing at all. Measurement hardware is separate: a Solmetric SunEye 210 is US$2,195 for the base kit, about Rs 1.82 lakh before import duty.