Best Solar Shading Analysis Software Malaysia 2026

If you are choosing solar shading analysis software in Malaysia, the first useful thing to know is what you can stop worrying about. Kuala Lumpur sits at 3.1 degrees north. Solar noon elevation here stays above roughly 63 degrees in every month of the year, so shadow multiples are small and inter-row self-shading is close to solved before you open a tool. What is left is a different set of problems, and they are not the ones the Singapore or European playbook prepares you for. Malaysian PV is heavily industrial rooftop, which means the shading objects are turbine ventilators, monitor roof upstands, chillers and water tanks scattered across a long-span factory roof. On rural and plantation-adjacent sites, the objects are oil palm and rainforest canopy that keep growing. And because NEM 3.0 runs four separate settlement mechanisms, the same shaded kilowatt-hour is worth four different amounts depending on which scheme the site is on, which is why the hour of day the loss falls in matters more here than the annual percentage. The tool that wins our 2026 bench test is SurgePV at about MYR 5,720 (US$1,299) per user per year, and this guide ranks ten shading tools in ringgit.

Direct answer. The best solar shading analysis software in Malaysia for 2026 is SurgePV, at about MYR 5,720 (US$1,299) per user per year on the 5-User Team plan. It runs an 8,760-hour module-level shading engine with anisotropic sky modelling, builds obstruction geometry from satellite imagery in under 60 seconds, and reports loss by hour of day so it can be valued against the site’s NEM mechanism. PVsyst still wins where a lender or a large-scale solar bid names the tool.

This guide is for Malaysian EPC contractors, consulting engineers and in-house design teams working commercial and industrial rooftops across the Klang Valley, Penang, Johor and the Iskandar corridor, plus teams operating in Sabah and Sarawak where the rules diverge. It gives the sun-angle arithmetic first, then the two obstruction problems that carry this market, then the tariff argument, then the ranking.

Why 3.1 Degrees North Makes Row Spacing a Non-Issue

Shading physics is identical everywhere. What varies by latitude is which term dominates the answer. Solar noon elevation is 90 degrees minus the absolute difference between latitude and solar declination, and at 3.1N that difference never gets large.

The full year at 3.1N looks like this. On 21 December, declination is 23.44 degrees south, the angular gap is 26.58 degrees and solar noon elevation is 63.4 degrees. On 21 June, declination is 23.44 degrees north, the gap is 20.30 degrees and elevation is 69.7 degrees. The sun crosses the zenith twice a year. There is no low-sun season. The tangent of 63.4 degrees is 1.99, so one metre of array height casts 0.50 m of shadow at the single worst noon of the year, against 3.99 m at Berlin latitude.

The consequence is the opposite of what most imported templates assume. In Malaysia, row pitch is decided by maintenance access, wind uplift on a lightweight metal deck, and airflow in a climate where cell temperature is already the largest single loss. If a vendor is selling you inter-row optimisation, they are optimising a term that is already small. The global pillar on solar shading analysis software covers the engine mechanics that apply in every market. This page covers what actually changes at 3.1 degrees north on a Malaysian factory roof.

Inter-Row Spacing at 3.1N: The Arithmetic

Solar noon is the easy case. A real spacing rule protects a design window, conventionally 9 am to 3 pm solar time on the worst day, because the sun is both lower and swung further east at 9 am. The row-direction shadow is height divided by the tangent of solar elevation, multiplied by the cosine of the sun’s azimuth measured from due south.

At Kuala Lumpur on 21 December at 9 am solar time, solar elevation is about 38.8 degrees and the sun sits about 56 degrees east of south. That gives a row-direction shadow of 0.69 m per metre of array rise, against 0.50 m at noon. So the 9 am case governs, and it is still small.

Put a real module on that. A 2.28 m module in portrait on a flat or low-pitch industrial roof:

Configuration	Array rise	KL min pitch	Berlin-latitude min pitch (noon)	Ground coverage ratio
2.28 m portrait, 5° tilt	0.20 m	2.41 m	3.06 m	0.95
2.28 m portrait, 10° tilt	0.40 m	2.52 m	3.82 m	0.90
2.28 m portrait, 15° tilt	0.59 m	2.61 m	4.55 m	0.87
2.28 m portrait, 20° tilt	0.78 m	2.68 m	5.25 m	0.85

On a 60 m deep factory roof in Shah Alam at 10 degrees tilt, KL geometry fits 23 rows where a Berlin template fits 15. Tilt optimisation is also a weak lever here: at 3.1N with a diffuse fraction around 55 percent, the annual yield difference between 5 and 15 degrees is small, so the tilt decision is really about drainage, self-cleaning and wind uplift. The tilt angle entry covers the term, and the Malaysia design software guide covers the structural and NEM sides in detail.

Factory Roof Clutter Is the Malaysian Shading Problem

This is the variable that carries this market. Malaysian PV is dominated by commercial and industrial rooftop, and the roofs are large, low-pitch and long-span: manufacturing sheds in Shah Alam and Klang, electronics plants in Bayan Lepas and Kulim, logistics warehouses along the North-South corridor and in the Iskandar region. These are excellent roofs for PV and terrible roofs for a shading model that only understands parapets.

Four object classes do most of the damage, and each behaves differently:

• Turbine ventilators. Rows of wind-driven roof ventilators, typically 0.6 to 1.0 m above the deck, spaced along the ridge. Individually trivial, collectively a repeating obstruction pattern that clips one or two module rows all day. The trap is that they are small enough to be traced away as noise on a satellite image and large enough to matter at module level.
• Monitor roofs and raised ridge vents. A monitor roof is a continuous raised section running the full ridge length of a shed, commonly 1.2 to 2.0 m above the main deck. Its shadow is a continuous line, not a point, and it moves across the deck through the day. This is the object most often modelled wrongly, because a designer places one box where the reality is a 90 m long upstand.
• Plant: chillers, air handling units, cooling towers, water tanks, exhaust stacks. Heights of 2 to 8 m and irregular placement. On process-heavy sites these dominate.
• Long-span structural elements and level changes. Two sheds of different heights sharing a wall, a stepped roof, a crane gantry. A 4 m step across a roof behaves like a small building.

Using the KL factors of 0.50 m per metre at December noon and 1.25 m per metre at 9 am December, along the sun’s direction:

Rooftop object	Height above array	December noon shadow	9 am December shadow
Turbine ventilator	0.8 m	0.40 m	1.00 m
Parapet upstand	0.9 m	0.45 m	1.12 m
Monitor roof upstand	1.5 m	0.75 m	1.87 m
Air handling unit or chiller	2.2 m	1.10 m	2.74 m
Elevated water tank	6.0 m	3.01 m	7.48 m
Adjacent taller shed	10 m	5.02 m	12.46 m

Two things follow. First, the individual shadows are short, which is good news, but the objects are numerous and distributed across the whole roof, which means the loss is spread thinly over many modules rather than concentrated on a few. That is precisely the pattern that a plane-level or string-level shading model reports badly and a module-level model reports correctly. On a cluttered Malaysian factory roof, module-level resolution is not a refinement, it is the difference between a usable answer and a wrong one.

Second, the scene-building workload is the real cost. A 5 MW roof in Klang can carry 200 discrete obstructions. If your tool needs each one drawn by hand, a single study is a two-day job and it will simply not get done on every quote. Ask any vendor to build one real factory roof with its actual ventilator rows during the trial and time it.

Palm and Rainforest Canopy on Rural and Plantation-Adjacent Sites

Away from the industrial estates, Malaysia’s shading objects are biological, and this is the second thing that separates it from Singapore. Ground-mount and rural rooftop projects sit next to oil palm, rubber and secondary forest, and vegetation behaves in three ways that buildings do not.

It is tall. Mature oil palm commonly reaches 12 to 15 m, and older stands go higher before replanting. Secondary forest edges run 20 to 25 m, and rainforest emergents exceed 30 m. At the KL factors above, a 12 m palm casts 6.0 m at December noon and 15.0 m at 9 am. A 30 m emergent casts 15.1 m and 37.4 m. Those are building-scale shadows from something a satellite image renders as texture.

It grows. This is the modelling point most studies miss. Oil palm gains trunk height at roughly 25 to 45 cm a year depending on the planting material and site, so a stand that is 10 m tall at commissioning is 16 m or more by year 20 of a PV asset’s life. A shading study run against today’s canopy is optimistic by construction. The correct treatment is the same in principle as the future-state building scenario used in Singapore but with different inputs: run a second scene at the projected canopy height at year 15 or year 20, and report the yield as a range.

It is porous and seasonal in a way a building is not. A palm frond canopy transmits some light rather than blocking it cleanly, so treating a palm as an opaque cylinder overstates the loss, while treating it as a transparency factor without geometry understates the concentration on individual modules. Neither is exactly right. The pragmatic approach we use is to model the trunk and crown as opaque geometry, then note in the report that the result is conservative, rather than pretending to a precision that the biology does not support.

The tooling consequence is specific: the ability to place tall cylindrical or conical objects quickly at a stated height, duplicate them along a row or across a grid, and then bulk-edit that height to run the growth scenario. Very few PV tools have a bulk height edit. Where you have a drone available, photogrammetry solves the measurement problem outright, which is why Scanifly earns a genuine place on a Malaysian list rather than a token one.

Get your shading numbers sanity-checked. For an independent second opinion on a disputed yield, a cluttered factory roof or a canopy growth scenario before it reaches your client, talk to our engineering team.

NEM 3.0: Why a Lost Kilowatt-Hour Is Worth Four Different Amounts

Here is the argument that should change how a Malaysian team reads a shading report, and it has nothing to do with geometry.

NEM 3.0 is not one scheme. NEM Rakyat offsets exported units against imported units one to one for residential consumers, so an exported kilowatt-hour is worth the retail tariff. NEM NOVA, the net offset virtual aggregation mechanism for commercial and industrial consumers, credits exports at a displaced cost rate that sits materially below the retail tariff, and allows offsetting across multiple accounts held by the same entity. NEM GoMEn covers government ministries and agencies. SELCO, the self-consumption pathway, exports nothing at all: the inverter is export-limited and every generated unit either displaces a purchased unit or is curtailed. Quota positions across these programmes have moved repeatedly since 2024, so confirm the live status with SEDA Malaysia and TNB before anything goes into a proposal.

Now apply that to shading. A single annual shading factor, a number like “the array loses 4.2 percent to shade”, implicitly assumes every lost kilowatt-hour is worth the same. That assumption holds under NEM Rakyat and it fails under the other three:

Scheme	What an exported unit is worth	Does the hour of the shading loss matter?
NEM Rakyat	Retail tariff, one to one offset	Barely. An annual factor is close to adequate.
NEM NOVA	Displaced cost rate, below retail	Yes. A unit lost during self-consumption hours costs retail, a unit lost during export hours costs the lower credit rate.
NEM GoMEn	Programme-defined	Yes, on the same logic as NOVA.
SELCO	Nothing, exports are limited	Strongly. A unit lost while the inverter is already curtailing costs zero. A unit lost during a load peak costs full retail.

The SELCO case is the sharpest and it is the fastest growing segment. On an export-limited factory array, midday generation is often already being clipped against the limit, so shading that falls in the middle of the day may cost literally nothing, while the same amount of shading at 8 am, when the plant starts and the array is well below the limit, costs the full commercial tariff. Two shading studies reporting the same 4.2 percent annual figure can therefore describe projects with completely different economics. See inverter clipping for the underlying behaviour, and the QBits Energy explainer on clipping for the inverter side.

There is a second layer that almost nobody models. Malaysian medium-voltage industrial customers pay a maximum demand charge based on the highest recorded demand interval in the month, and that charge is a meaningful share of the bill. If a shadow crosses the array during the interval that sets the monthly maximum demand, the cost is not the lost energy, it is the lost demand reduction, priced in ringgit per kilowatt per month rather than per kilowatt-hour. Verify the current rate against the applicable TNB schedule, because the tariff structure has been revised. The practical instruction is short: on any SELCO or NOVA industrial project, ask for the shading loss as an 8,760-hour series and overlay it on the site’s load profile. If your tool cannot export that series, it cannot answer the question that decides the project.

The Four-Scheme Shading Check. Before you accept a Malaysian shading study, ask four questions:

1. Which NEM mechanism is this site on? If the answer is not in the report, the loss has not been valued, only measured.
2. Is the array export-limited? If yes, what share of the shading loss falls in hours the inverter would have been clipping anyway.
3. What is the load profile? A single-shift factory and a 24-hour process plant value a 4 pm shadow completely differently.
4. Does any shading window overlap the likely maximum demand interval? This is the term with the highest ringgit per kilowatt-hour and the one least often checked.

Sarawak and Sabah Are Not Peninsular Malaysia

One more Malaysian caveat that a national assumption will get wrong. Suruhanjaya Tenaga’s jurisdiction covers Peninsular Malaysia along with Sabah and Labuan. Sarawak regulates its own electricity supply industry under state law with Sarawak Energy as the utility, and its net metering and self-consumption arrangements do not simply mirror the Peninsular ones. Sabah, served by Sabah Electricity, has different grid conditions and connection realities in parts of the state.

For a shading study specifically, three things change:

• The tariff logic above does not transfer. The four-mechanism analysis is a Peninsular and Sabah framing. For a Kuching site you value the loss against the Sarawak scheme, not against NOVA.
• Site types shift. East Malaysian projects are more often plantation-adjacent, forest-edge or off-grid hybrid than dense industrial estate, which moves the dominant obstruction from rooftop plant to canopy.
• Connectivity is worse. On a remote Sarawak or interior Sabah site, a cloud-only design tool with no offline mode is a genuine operational problem, and this is one of the few markets where PV*SOL’s desktop install is a real advantage rather than a drawback.

Details on the regulatory split sit with Suruhanjaya Tenaga and in our Malaysia full stack software guide.

The 5-Point Malaysia Shading Bench Test

This is the framework we score shading tools on before deploying them, adapted to Malaysian conditions. Five axes, ten points each, out of 50. We do not deploy below 38.

1. Cluttered roof geometry at speed. Can you place, duplicate and array 200 small obstructions on a long-span factory roof without drafting each one. Highest weight of the five, because this is where the study either happens or does not.
2. Time-resolved, exportable loss. An 8,760-hour loss series you can pull out and overlay on a load profile and a NEM mechanism. An annual percentage alone is not enough in a four-scheme market.
3. Tall vegetation handling and growth scenarios. Cylindrical and conical objects with a bulk-editable height, so a canopy at year 20 is one edit rather than a rebuild.
4. Sky model quality. Anisotropic transposition (Perez or Hay-Davies) named in the report. Under a diffuse fraction around 55 percent, an unstated isotropic default misprices any module with a restricted sky view.
5. Cost per finished shading study in MYR, including add-on tiers and scene-building time.

Scores: SurgePV 44, PVsyst 43, HelioScope 40, PVSOL Premium 38, Scanifly 36, Solmetric SunEye 33, Aurora Solar 31, Solargis 29 as a data layer rather than a shading engine, Meteonorm with PVGIS horizon 26, OpenSolar 24. The scoring is ours and it is opinionated. On axis five taken alone, SurgePV does not win: PVsyst at CHF 700 per user per year and OpenSolar’s free core platform both cost less than SurgePV per seat, and PVSOL at EUR 845 per named user does too. SurgePV’s total scores higher because axes one and two carry the Malaysian case, not because it is the cheapest licence on the page.

Top 10 Solar Shading Analysis Software in Malaysia Compared

Pricing is 2026, with USD in brackets converted at approximately MYR 4.40 per dollar. Dollar-quoted vendors move with the exchange rate.

#	Tool	Price (MYR)	Shading capability	Best for
1	SurgePV	MYR 5,720/user/yr (US$1,299)	8,760-hr module-level, anisotropic sky, fast obstruction arrays	EPCs running shading on every C&I quote
2	PVsyst	CHF 700/user/yr Professional, annual subscription	Reference near-shading 3D scene and loss diagram	Lender due diligence, LSS and CGPP bids
3	HelioScope	US$159/mo Basic, US$259/mo Pro (~MYR 700 to MYR 1,140)	Module-level C&I yield with clean loss tree	Consultancies on 500 kW to 5 MW rooftops
4	PV*SOL Premium	EUR 845 per named user per year plus VAT	3D shading animation, shade frequency, offline	Client persuasion and East Malaysian sites
5	Scanifly	Not publicly listed	Drone photogrammetry as-built capture	Cluttered factory roofs and canopy heights
6	Solmetric SunEye 210	US$2,195 base, North America (~MYR 9,660)	Measured on-roof skyline, no modelling assumption	Disputes and forest-edge sites
7	Aurora Solar	US$135/user/mo Basic, US$220 Premium, billed annually (~MYR 594 to MYR 968)	Irradiance maps, shade engine on Premium	Teams also serving US clients
8	Solargis	Prospect Basic EUR 2,400/yr; no per-site price published	Satellite irradiance and diffuse fraction data layer	Getting the sky input right
9	Meteonorm with PVGIS horizon	Meteonorm CHF 675 first licence (~MYR 3,600), PVGIS free	Far-horizon profile as a model input	Hilly interior and East Malaysian terrain
10	OpenSolar	Core platform free; add-on rates not published	Sales-grade shading on the free tier	Solo installers doing residential volume

Positions 1 to 4 are engines. Position 5 and 6 are capture and measurement instruments feeding an engine. Positions 8 and 9 are data layers. Positions 7 and 10 are strong on sales workflow and weaker on the Malaysian shading case specifically. Note that positions 8 and 9 are on the list for opposite reasons: Solargis fixes the sky input on a flat site, while the Meteonorm and PVGIS horizon route matters on hilly interior Peninsular and East Malaysian terrain where the far horizon is genuinely not flat.

1. SurgePV

What it does best for Malaysian shading. SurgePV runs 8,760-hour module-level shading with bypass-diode physics on every paid plan, with no add-on tier, which matters because module-level resolution is the whole game on a cluttered factory roof. Sky transposition is anisotropic and the model is stated in the report. The capability that decides it here is scene speed: the AI 3D roof pulls a long-span shed from satellite imagery in under 60 seconds, and obstructions can be placed, duplicated and arrayed along a ridge rather than drawn one at a time, so a roof with 200 turbine ventilators is a manageable job rather than a two-day one. Loss is reported by hour of day and the 8,760-hour series exports, which is what makes the NEM valuation argument above actually executable. Shading, soiling and thermal sit on separate editable lines. A 1 MW industrial roof simulates in under five minutes.

Pricing. MYR 5,720 (US$1,299) per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, roughly MYR 28,600 for five seats. Individual seats about MYR 8,360. Free trial, no credit card.

Who it suits. Malaysian EPCs and consulting engineers who want a shading study on every C&I quote rather than only on financed projects.

Honest limitations. Four concrete ones, and the first is directly about this page’s argument. First, it does not value the shading loss against a NEM mechanism. It gives you the hourly loss series and it will not tell you what those hours are worth under NOVA versus SELCO versus Rakyat, so you export to a spreadsheet and do the valuation yourself. That is the single most useful thing a Malaysian shading tool could do and no tool on this list does it. Second, and relatedly, there is no maximum demand interaction: shading that falls inside the interval setting the monthly maximum demand is not surfaced anywhere, even though it is the most expensive shading on an industrial site. Third, vegetation is static geometry with a typed height. There is no canopy growth model and no point cloud or LiDAR import, so a palm-adjacent site depends on a height you measured, and the year-20 scenario is a manual re-entry. Fourth, it is cloud-only with no offline mode, which is a real problem on interior Sarawak and Sabah sites, it performs no drone capture, and brand recognition is thin because the product launched in 2025, so a large-scale solar bid naming PVsyst still means running PVsyst.

Book a SurgePV demo and bring a real Selangor or Penang factory roof with its actual ventilator rows, so you can judge the obstruction workflow rather than a clean showcase file.

2. PVsyst

What it does best. PVsyst is the reference. Its near-shading 3D scene editor is the most complete obstruction geometry implementation available, it handles irregular rooftop plant and tall vegetation correctly, and its loss diagram is the artefact that Malaysian banks and international lenders ask for by name. On lender-named bankability, and on large-scale solar and corporate green power programme bids, PVsyst beats SurgePV outright.

Pricing. PVsyst bills in Swiss francs, as an annual subscription rather than a perpetual licence: CHF 700 per user per year for Professional, CHF 420 Education, CHF 560 Training and Research, CHF 25 Student and Classroom, and CHF 3,000 for PVsystCLI, with group discounts of 5 to 20 percent by quantity. Five Professional seats are CHF 3,500 a year. Stated plainly, that is cheaper than five SurgePV seats at US$6,495, so PVsyst wins the cost axis of our bench outright even though it loses the scene-building one.

Honest limitations. Building the near-shading scene is slow, and on a factory roof with 200 ventilators it is punishing, which in practice means the study gets simplified and the simplification is where the error enters. Windows desktop only, no proposal output, no client-facing heatmap, no NEM logic of any kind. Heaven Designs’ guide to reading a PVsyst loss diagram is the fastest way in.

3. HelioScope

What it does best. Module-level 8,760-hour simulation with a readable loss tree that separates shading from soiling, mismatch and thermal. For a 2 MW Klang warehouse roof, a HelioScope report is accepted by Malaysian technical reviewers without argument, and the loss tree makes the shading share visible rather than buried. Its handling of large flat industrial roofs is genuinely strong, which is the dominant Malaysian site type.

Pricing. HelioScope prices in US dollars: Basic US$159 a month or US$1,620 a year, Pro US$259 a month or US$2,640 a year, each for one user and ten projects a month, with DC design capped at 1.25 MW on Basic and 5 MW on Pro. At MYR 4.40 per dollar that is about MYR 700 to MYR 1,140 a seat a month, and five Basic seats are US$8,100 a year, roughly MYR 35,640.

Honest limitations. Obstruction modelling is manual with no AI roof build, so ventilator rows are drafting work. No proposal tooling, no NEM settlement logic, no vegetation growth handling, and per-seat monthly pricing scales badly as a Malaysian team grows. See our HelioScope alternative comparison.

4. PV*SOL Premium

What it does best. The 3D shading animation is the best client-facing shading artefact on the market, rendering shadow movement across the array through the day and year plus a per-module shade frequency visual. When a factory manager insists the cooling tower is not a problem, this settles it in one screen. It also runs entirely offline, which is worth more in Sarawak and interior Sabah than almost anywhere else on this cluster.

Pricing. PVSOL premium is a named-user subscription in euros, not 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 less than five SurgePV seats. Licences bought before 19 November 2024 remain usable indefinitely, but maintenance renewals on them ended on 1 October 2024.

Honest limitations. Windows desktop only, single user, a dated interface, manual 3D scene building, a component library thin on the Chinese and Southeast Asian modules commonly specified here, and support hours that do not align with Malaysian working days.

5. Scanifly

What it does best. Drone photogrammetry that turns a short flight into an accurate as-built 3D model with every obstruction at its real height. On a Malaysian industrial roof this is the strongest answer to the ventilator and plant problem, because the model comes back complete instead of being drawn from a satellite image and a guess. On a plantation-adjacent site it also solves the canopy height measurement problem, which is otherwise the least reliable input in the whole model.

Pricing. Scanifly does not publish pricing, in any currency or on any basis. There is no per-seat rate and no per-project rate on its site, so the only figure you can rely on is a quote you obtain yourself. Numbers circulating in software directories are unverified.

Honest limitations. It captures, it does not simulate, so you still export into an engine that runs the physics. Malaysian drone operations sit under Civil Aviation Authority rules and require permissions, and parts of the Klang Valley and areas near airports are restricted, so a workflow that assumes a flight on demand will not survive contact with the schedule. It also captures today’s canopy, not year 20’s.

6. Solmetric SunEye 210

What it does best. A handheld fisheye skyline instrument. You stand at a point on the roof or in the field, take one capture, and it returns measured sky obstruction and monthly solar access for that exact position with no modelling assumption in the answer. At a forest edge, where estimating canopy height from imagery is close to guesswork, a measured skyline is the strongest evidence you can hold.

Pricing. US$2,195 for the base North American kit, about MYR 9,660 at MYR 4.40 per dollar, bought new from Solmetric as capital equipment. A lifetime PV Designer licence is included. It was out of stock as of 2 August 2026 with a stated 10 to 12 week lead time, so order ahead of the project rather than during it.

Honest limitations. It measures points, not arrays, so a large roof needs many captures and interpolation. It cannot represent a canopy that will be six metres taller in fifteen years, and it cannot value the loss against a tariff. Roof access is required and servicing routes abroad. It is a current product, not a discontinued one, and Solmetric has been a Fluke company since the acquisition announced on 12 September 2023, so treat used-market listings as a convenience rather than the only way to buy one.

7. Aurora Solar

What it does best. Strong irradiance mapping and a capable shade engine, with good LIDAR-backed roof detection where LIDAR exists. For a Malaysian team doing design outsourcing for US installers, Aurora fluency is a commercial asset in itself.

Pricing. Aurora publishes US dollar prices: Basic US$135 per user per month billed annually, US$159 monthly, and Premium US$220 billed annually, US$259 monthly, each covering one user and 50 projects a month. At MYR 4.40 per dollar that is about MYR 594 to MYR 968 a seat a month. Five Premium seats are US$13,200 a year and five Basic seats US$8,100. The old Grow, Scale and Run tiers no longer exist. Worth saying plainly: Aurora Basic at US$1,620 a year undercuts a SurgePV Individual seat at US$1,899.

Honest limitations. The product is built around a detached-house residential market, and Malaysia’s volume is industrial rooftop, so much of the workflow is dead weight here. LIDAR coverage across Malaysia is limited so the headline roof capture feature degrades to manual tracing, LIDAR modelling and bankable shade reports sit on Premium rather than Basic, plan sets are a separately priced service rather than a plan inclusion, and there is no NEM logic. See our Aurora Solar alternative breakdown.

8. Solargis

What it does best. Solargis is a satellite-derived irradiance data service rather than a shading tool, and it is here deliberately. In a market where the diffuse fraction runs around 55 percent under monsoon cloud, the quality of the direct and diffuse split feeding your model changes the answer more than the choice of engine does. Solargis time series carry a documented uncertainty band in the format lenders typically ask for.

Pricing. Solargis publishes no per-site price, so any “cost per site” figure you see for it is invented. What it does publish is subscription tiers in euros: Prospect Basic EUR 2,400 a year covering 500 projects and 5 users, Prospect Professional EUR 4,800 a year, and Evaluate EUR 12,000 a year for 60 early-stage projects. Prospect Enterprise and the Time Series API are not publicly listed.

Honest limitations. It runs no shading geometry, no module physics and no yield model, so it is a purchase alongside a design tool rather than instead of one. For residential and small commercial work the cost is hard to justify against free typical meteorological year data.

9. Meteonorm with a PVGIS Horizon Workflow

What it does best. The cheapest defensible way to get the far horizon into a model. PVGIS publishes a terrain-derived horizon profile for any coordinate free of charge, and Meteonorm lets you attach a horizon profile to a generated weather file so far shading is baked into the irradiance series before the near-shading engine runs. In flat Klang Valley terms this is nearly a null result, and that is worth documenting. In the interior Peninsular highlands, in hilly Penang island sites and across much of Sabah and Sarawak, the terrain horizon is real and this workflow catches it for almost nothing.

Pricing. Meteonorm bills in Swiss francs and publishes its price: CHF 675 for a first licence and CHF 350 for each additional licence, excluding VAT. That is roughly MYR 3,600 and MYR 1,850, approximate, at about MYR 5.3 to the Swiss franc. It is a one-off purchase per software version rather than an annual subscription, and version upgrades are priced separately. PVGIS is free.

Honest limitations. A horizon profile is far shading only. It carries no rooftop plant, no vegetation, no module-level detail and no bypass diode behaviour, so on a Selangor factory roof it addresses the term that matters least. Use it as a data input and nothing more.

10. OpenSolar

What it does best. A free design tier that gets a small installer to a shaded layout and a client-ready document quickly, with a low barrier to entry for a new entrant doing residential volume under NEM Rakyat, where an annual shading factor is genuinely close to adequate.

Pricing. The core platform is free, for any number of users. OpenSolar has said that API Access, charged per project on creation, and Connectors, charged as a flat monthly fee, become chargeable from 16 April 2026, but it has not published those rates and they vary by geography. So the honest position is that a five-seat Malaysian team pays nothing today and cannot yet be quoted a 2026 add-on figure. Nothing else on this list is cheaper.

Honest limitations. Shading is a sales output, not an engineering one. The free tier does not carry commercial work or bankable shading, and obstruction geometry is coarse. Because the 2026 add-on rates are unpublished, you also cannot budget the total cost of ownership beyond this year with any confidence. Do not put it in front of a lender. See our Malaysia proposal software guide for the sales-side tooling instead.

Is a Shading Report Required in Malaysia?

Plainly: no. There is no statutory or regulatory requirement for a shading study on a Malaysian solar project. Unlike the UK, where the MCS Standard Estimation Method defines a shading factor inside a regulated calculation, Malaysian rules do not name one. Suruhanjaya Tenaga regulates installation through registered electrical contractors and competent persons, SEDA administers the NEM programmes, and TNB runs the interconnection process. None of them requires a shading analysis. We are not going to invent a requirement.

The pressure is commercial, and it is real:

• Solar power purchase agreements and leases. A large share of Malaysian C&I rooftop is delivered under a PPA or lease where the developer carries generation risk for 20 years or more. The shading assumption is the thing being underwritten.
• Lender and investor due diligence. Project finance and large-scale solar or corporate green power bids ask for P50, P75 and P90 yield bands from a recognised engine with shading as an explicit loss line. This is where PVsyst’s name still carries weight.
• The NEM valuation problem. Because the four mechanisms price a lost unit differently, the time-resolved shading result is a commercial input to the financial model, not just an engineering footnote. That alone justifies the study on any NOVA or SELCO project.
• Client disputes. A generation shortfall in month three is the commonest complaint, and a shading heatmap attached to the contract is the difference between a conversation and a credit note.

Climate and cloud records for the diffuse fraction figures used above come from the Malaysian Meteorological Department, and deployment context sits with the IEA and IRENA country trackers.

Mistakes Malaysian Designers Make in Shading Analysis

1. 1
   Carrying European row pitch onto a 3.1N roof. A 4.55 m pitch where 2.61 m is correct costs a Shah Alam factory roof close to half the capacity it could carry, and the client never sees the modules that were not proposed.
2. 2
   Reporting one annual shading percentage on a SELCO site. If the array is export-limited, shading during clipping hours costs nothing and shading at plant start-up costs full tariff. The same 4.2 percent can describe two completely different projects.
3. 3
   Simplifying away the ventilator rows. Individually small, collectively a repeating obstruction across the whole roof. Simplifying them out is the commonest way a Malaysian factory roof study goes quietly wrong.
4. 4
   Modelling a monitor roof as a single box. A raised ridge section is a continuous 90 m upstand, and its shadow is a moving line across the deck, not a patch in one corner.
5. 5
   Modelling canopy at today's height. Oil palm gains roughly 25 to 45 cm of trunk height a year, so a 10 m stand is 16 m or more by year 20. Run the growth scenario and report a range.
6. 6
   Applying Peninsular assumptions in Sarawak. Sarawak regulates its own electricity supply industry with its own utility and scheme structure, so the tariff valuation of a shading loss does not transfer from a Selangor project.
7. 7
   Confusing tropical soiling with shading. Soiling and haze losses are broadly uniform across the array, flat across the daylight curve, and reset after heavy rain. Shading is geometric, concentrated and does not move after rain. See soiling loss.
8. 8
   Grouping shaded and unshaded modules on one MPPT. With obstructions spread thinly across a large roof, string grouping should follow the shading geometry, not the cable route. See MPPT.

Should a Malaysian Team Standardise on SurgePV for Shading?

For most Malaysian EPCs the sensible shape is one primary engine for the C&I pipeline, PVsyst kept in reserve for bankability packs and large-scale bids, and a drone capture partner engaged per project rather than a licence bought outright.

How Heaven Green Energy Helps

Heaven Green Energy is a solar EPC with more than 200 MW installed, and our engineering group builds the software we use ourselves. SurgePV came out of that: a design suite written by people who had to defend a yield number to a client and a lender in the same week. Every proposal we issue carries a shading heatmap with the sky model stated and soiling on a separate line, and on any export-limited industrial site we show the loss by hour rather than as a single annual figure.

• 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 EPC services: turnkey delivery with the shading study attached to the contract.
• Solar Calculator: sizing and savings in 60 seconds.

For the engine itself, see the SurgePV shadow analysis module.

Related Solar Software Guides

• Solar Shading Analysis Software: The Global Guide
• Best Solar Design Software in Malaysia
• Best Solar Proposal Software in Malaysia
• Best Solar Software in Malaysia: The Full Stack
• Best Solar Shading Analysis Software in Singapore
• Best Solar Shading Analysis Software in the Philippines
• Commercial Solar Design Software
• Best Solar Design Software: The Global Ranking

Frequently Asked Questions

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

SurgePV ranks first on our 5-point Malaysia shading bench with 44 of 50, at about MYR 5,720 per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, roughly MYR 28,600 for five seats. It runs 8,760-hour module-level simulation with anisotropic sky transposition stated in the report, places and arrays rooftop obstructions fast enough that a factory roof with 200 ventilators is workable, and exports the hourly loss series so it can be valued against the site’s NEM mechanism. PVsyst scores 43 and stays the stronger choice where a lender or a large-scale solar bid names the tool.

How much row spacing does a rooftop array need in Kuala Lumpur?

Much less than European templates assume. KL sits at 3.1N, so solar noon elevation stays above about 63.4 degrees all year and one metre of array height casts only 0.50 m of shadow at the worst noon. Protecting a 9 am to 3 pm December window, a 2.28 m module in portrait at 10 degrees tilt needs roughly 2.52 m of pitch, against about 3.82 m at Berlin latitude. Ground coverage ratios of 0.85 to 0.95 are normal on a Malaysian industrial roof.

Why does NEM 3.0 change how a shading report should be read?

Because NEM 3.0 runs four settlement mechanisms and each prices a lost kilowatt-hour differently. NEM Rakyat offsets exports one to one at the retail tariff, so an annual shading factor is close to adequate. NEM NOVA credits commercial exports at a displaced cost rate below retail, so the hour matters. NEM GoMEn follows similar logic for government premises. SELCO exports nothing at all, so shading during hours when the export-limited inverter was already clipping costs zero while shading at plant start-up costs full tariff. Ask for the loss as an 8,760-hour series and overlay it on the load profile.

What are the main shading objects on a Malaysian factory roof?

Four classes. Turbine ventilators at 0.6 to 1.0 m, individually trivial and collectively a repeating pattern across the whole deck. Monitor roof upstands at 1.2 to 2.0 m, which are continuous linear obstructions running the full ridge length rather than single boxes. Plant such as chillers, air handling units, cooling towers and water tanks at 2 to 8 m. And structural level changes where two sheds of different heights meet. At the December noon factor of 0.50 m per metre, a 2.2 m chiller casts 1.10 m and a 6 m water tank casts 3.01 m, rising to 2.74 m and 7.48 m at 9 am.

How should oil palm and rainforest canopy be modelled in a shading study?

As tall opaque geometry, then re-run at a projected future height. Mature oil palm commonly reaches 12 to 15 m and rainforest emergents exceed 30 m, so at KL sun angles a 12 m palm casts 6.0 m at December noon and 15.0 m at 9 am. Palm gains roughly 25 to 45 cm of trunk height a year, so a stand that is 10 m at commissioning is 16 m or more by year 20 of the asset life. Model today’s canopy and a year-15 or year-20 canopy, and report the yield as a range rather than a single figure.

Is a shading report required by Malaysian regulation?

No. There is no statutory requirement. Suruhanjaya Tenaga regulates installation through registered electrical contractors and competent persons, SEDA administers the NEM programmes and TNB runs interconnection, and none of them mandates a shading study. The pressure is commercial: a large share of C&I rooftop is delivered under a 20 year PPA or lease where the developer carries generation risk, lenders want shading as an explicit line in a P50, P75 and P90 loss tree, and the four-mechanism NEM structure makes the time-resolved shading result a financial model input.

Does shading analysis differ in Sarawak and Sabah?

Yes, in three ways. Sarawak regulates its own electricity supply industry under state law with Sarawak Energy as the utility, so the NEM valuation logic used for a Peninsular site does not transfer to a Kuching one. East Malaysian project sites are more often plantation-adjacent, forest-edge or off-grid hybrid than dense industrial estate, which moves the dominant obstruction from rooftop plant to canopy. And connectivity in the interior is poor enough that a cloud-only design tool with no offline mode becomes an operational problem.

Does the sky model matter for shading analysis in Malaysia?

Yes. The annual diffuse fraction of global horizontal irradiance runs around 55 percent under monsoon cloud, so a large share of the energy reaching a module arrives from the sky dome rather than the solar disc. An isotropic model reduces shading loss to a simple sky view factor and prices a blocked horizon identically to a blocked zenith, when the two carry different radiance. On a roof covered in low obstructions that block the horizon band, that error is systematic. Insist on Perez or Hay-Davies and insist the report names which one was used.

How do I separate shading loss from soiling and haze loss in Malaysia?

Look at the spatial pattern, the daily shape and the rain response. Shading is geometric and non-uniform, clusters into a fixed daily window that repeats seasonally, and does not change after rain. Soiling and haze losses are broadly uniform across the array, flat across the daylight curve, and drop sharply after heavy rain. Rainfall keeps Malaysian rooftop soiling relatively low for a tropical market, but haze episodes and industrial estate dust push it up, and re-stringing an array will never fix a soiling problem.