Best Solar Shading Analysis Software Saudi Arabia 2026

Choosing solar shading analysis software in Saudi Arabia is a different exercise from choosing one for a rooftop market, and it starts with a correction that costs Gulf operators real money every year: most of what gets reported as a shading loss here is soiling. Dust and shade both show up as a gap against the model, both get argued about in the same meeting, and in a tool that reports a single combined loss they are genuinely indistinguishable. Get the label wrong and you send an engineer to re-string an array that needed a shorter cleaning cycle. Past that, the Kingdom’s shading question is different in kind from a villa market, because the National Renewable Energy Program has pushed the centre of gravity to large ground mount, where the interesting problems are inter-row geometry, tracker backtracking and terrain. Our design team standardises on SurgePV at about SAR 4,870 (US$1,299) per user per year for rooftop and C&I work, and this page says plainly where three competitors beat it.

Direct answer. For Saudi rooftop and commercial and industrial shading work the best tool in 2026 is SurgePV at about SAR 4,870 per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, because it runs an 8,760-hour module-level simulation and takes a cleaning interval as a soiling input rather than a European default. For utility-scale ground mount it is not the answer: PVcase wins on terrain-aware row geometry, PVsyst wins on tracker and backtracking physics that a lender’s technical advisor will accept, and RatedPower wins on testing many configurations against a tender deadline.

This guide is for Saudi developers, EPC engineers and consultants whose yield numbers are being challenged. It ranks ten tools on shading and irradiance specifically. The wider platform decision is in our best solar design software in Saudi Arabia ranking, and the physics common to every market is in the solar shading analysis software pillar.

The Correction: Gulf Shading Losses Are Usually Soiling

Temperate markets built the global tools, and in a temperate market soiling is a rounding error while shading is the variable worth modelling. The Kingdom inverts that, particularly in the Eastern Province, and the inherited habit produces confident, wrong diagnoses.

The two losses are different physics. Shading blocks the beam component of irradiance from part of the array at a particular sun position. Soiling reduces transmission through the glass across the whole surface, from dust, sabkha salt, cement dust off nearby construction and post-shamal deposition. They leave different fingerprints, and any competent investigation reads the fingerprint before it reads the model.

Signature	Shading	Soiling
Spatial pattern	Fixed and local. The same rows, the same strings, every time	Diffuse across the whole array, heavier at low tilt and along frames
Time of day	Sharp edges at repeatable clock hours, following the sun path	Flat. The same proportional loss across all daylight hours
Day to day	Near identical, drifting slowly with the seasonal sun path	Climbs monotonically between cleaning events
After a clean or rain	Unchanged	Steps back up almost immediately
Seasonal shape	Worst near the December solstice when the sun is lowest	Worst in the dust season, independent of sun position
Electrical fingerprint	Non-linear. Bypass diodes conduct, string mismatch multiplies the loss	Roughly linear current reduction, mismatch only where deposition is very uneven
The fix	Re-space rows, re-string, correct the backtracking, remove the object	Change the cleaning interval or the cleaning method

Eastern Province Dust and the Separation Test

The Dammam, Jubail and Ras Al Khair belt is where this matters most. Shamal events deposit heavily and quickly, and post-event soiling on an uncleaned array can take a double-digit percentage off a month rather than a year. That size of loss is exactly the size that gets escalated, and escalated losses get investigated by whoever is available rather than by whoever knows the difference.

Two checks settle it without a laboratory.

Check the shape across days. Take four weeks of string-level power at fifteen minute resolution and normalise each string against the best performer in the same block. Shading shows a repeating notch at the same clock hours on the same subset of strings, drifting a few minutes a week with the sun path. Soiling shows every string descending together with no intraday structure, and the descent restarts from zero after each clean.

Check the step after a wash. Compare a clear day before a scheduled clean with the next clear day after it. Soiling recovers most of the gap in that single step. Shading does not move at all. On a robotically cleaned plant the cleaning cycle gives you this test every few days for free.

There is one honest complication. Very uneven deposition, for example a dust ridge along the lower frame of a tracker row parked near horizontal overnight, creates mismatch that behaves electrically like partial shading. That is the case where the fingerprints blur, and it is another argument for a cleaning interval short enough that deposition never becomes that uneven. The soiling loss and shading loss glossary entries cover both mechanisms.

Riyadh Geometry: Why Solar Noon Is the Wrong Criterion

Riyadh sits at about 24.7N. At the December solstice, declination is about 23.44 degrees south, so solar noon elevation is approximately 90 minus 24.7 minus 23.44, which is about 41.9 degrees. A 1 metre object casts about 1.12 metres of shadow at that instant.

Location	Latitude	Dec solar noon elevation	Shadow per 1 m of height
Riyadh	24.7N	41.9 degrees	1.12 m
Dammam	26.4N	40.2 degrees	1.19 m
Jeddah	21.5N	45.1 degrees	1.00 m
Tabuk	28.4N	38.2 degrees	1.27 m

Solar position figures follow the standard solar geometry published by the NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory solar calculator, 2026.

Now the part that a rooftop-derived rule of thumb gets wrong. Three hours either side of solar noon in late December, the sun at Riyadh’s latitude sits near 25 degrees elevation, and the shadow ratio rises to roughly 2.1 times the object height. Clearing noon means almost nothing on a ground-mount site, because the hours that decide annual energy on a fixed-tilt array run from mid-morning to mid-afternoon. Size row pitch against the winter solar window, not against the solstice noon instant. A fixed-tilt Saudi array sized on noon alone lands at a ground coverage ratio that looks generous on paper and shades itself for two hours every winter morning.

Backtracking: The Shading Control Strategy Most Buyers Never Ask About

Almost every large Saudi plant built this decade uses horizontal single-axis trackers, and on a tracker the shading question stops being a layout problem and becomes a control problem. This is the section that separates a tool that can model Saudi utility-scale work from one that cannot.

What true tracking does. A single-axis tracker rotates about a north-south torque tube to point the modules as directly at the sun as the single degree of freedom allows. Early and late in the day the sun is low, so the tracker rotates to a steep tilt. At a steep tilt the row is effectively tall, and it throws its shadow straight onto the row behind it. On a plant at a ground coverage ratio of 0.35, pure sun-following would put every row in its neighbour’s shadow for the first and last hour or two of every day.

What backtracking does instead. The controller deliberately rotates the trackers back away from the sun, toward horizontal, by exactly enough that each row’s shadow falls just short of the leading edge of the next row. You lose some direct beam by not pointing at the sun, and you gain by keeping every module in full sun. That trade is strongly positive because shading is non-linear: a shadow crossing the bottom of a row activates bypass diodes and drags the whole string down through string current mismatch, so the mismatch loss avoided is worth far more than the cosine loss accepted.

What the backtracking angle depends on. Ground coverage ratio and row pitch, module chord width, sun elevation and azimuth, and, critically, the ground slope beneath the row. Those first inputs are constants for a given design. The last is not.

Why slope breaks a flat-plane implementation. Backtracking maths assumes a known geometric relationship between adjacent rows. On sloping ground the effective pitch between rows changes: rows running down a slope are geometrically closer or further apart in the shadow direction than the plan-view pitch says. Software that computes backtracking on a flat-plane assumption over undulating desert therefore errs in both directions across the same site. Where the ground falls away from the sun the controller under-backtracks and the rows shade anyway, which is the expensive error. Where the ground rises it over-backtracks, giving away cosine gain for shading that was never going to happen, which is the quiet error nobody notices. Terrain-following backtracking, where the control angle is computed per tracker against the local slope, is the fix, and whether a tool models it is a legitimate procurement question rather than a specification detail.

Bifacial makes it more, not less, important. Rear-side irradiance depends on ground albedo and view factor, both of which change with tracker angle and row geometry, so a backtracking assumption that is wrong on the front side is wrong on the back side too. See the bifacial panel glossary entry for the mechanism.

Terrain Shading on Graded Desert Sites

Saudi ground-mount sites look flat in a satellite tile and are not. Wadi channels, sabkha flats, gentle escarpment slopes and the results of partial grading all produce row-to-row geometry that varies across the plant. Three consequences follow.

Plan-view pitch is not shadow-direction pitch. Two rows 6 metres apart in plan view on a 6 percent north-facing slope present a different shadowing geometry from the same two rows on flat ground. A model that uses one pitch across the whole plant is wrong nearly everywhere on a real site.

Grading is a cost that trades against a shading loss. Earthworks are expensive and slow, and the alternative is to accept terrain and design around it. That trade can only be evaluated if the software can price the shading loss of the ungraded case, which is precisely what a terrain-aware tool is for.

Tracker mechanical limits bound the design before the shading does. Standard single-axis trackers tolerate limited cross-slope across the torque tube and limited grade change along the row before articulating bearings or dedicated slope-tolerant products are needed. That mechanical constraint often decides the row layout, and the shading model has to work with the layout the terrain permits rather than the one it would prefer. Our sister engineering team’s ground-mount design service exists mainly because this stage is where imported designs fail.

Where Saudi Regulation Touches the Shading Question

There is no Saudi rule mandating a shading report, no prescribed method and no approved tool list for shading analysis, and it is worth saying that rather than inventing a requirement. What actually drives tool choice is contractual and financial.

Tender and lender documents name tools. NREP-adjacent tenders and the technical advisors reviewing large power purchase agreements expect a PVsyst loss diagram, and the shading and soiling lines in it are read as a pair. Where a document list names a tool, use it for the deliverable whatever you prefer for engineering.

Distributed work runs under a different regime. The Saudi Electricity Regulatory Authority regulates small-scale solar with a capacity ceiling and a regulated export settlement, which makes accurate yield matter for sizing rather than for a bid. That segment is covered in our best solar software in Saudi Arabia overview and the closing workflow in best solar proposal software in Saudi Arabia.

Availability and performance guarantees carry the risk. On a plant sold against an availability or performance ratio commitment, the difference between a shading finding and a soiling finding is the difference between a design defect and an operations and maintenance scope item. That is a commercial distinction, not an academic one, and it is settled by whether your report separated the two.

Top 10 Solar Shading Analysis Tools in Saudi Arabia Compared

Every vendor is quoted in the currency it bills in, with an approximate riyal figure at SAR 3.75 to the US dollar, SAR 4.05 to the euro and SAR 4.70 to the Swiss franc. The dollar peg means the USD-denominated rows carry no currency risk. Confirm before you buy.

#	Tool	Price (vendor currency, approx SAR)	Shading method	Terrain and trackers	Best for
1	SurgePV	US$1,299/user/yr (~SAR 4,870)	8,760-hour, module level, satellite 3D	Weak on terrain	Rooftop and C&I shading
2	PVsyst	CHF 700/user/yr (~SAR 3,290)	Hourly near and far shading, backtracking	Strong on trackers, moderate on terrain	Lender-facing yield and loss diagrams
3	PVcase	Not publicly listed, quote only	Terrain-aware row and tracker layout in CAD	Best in class	Graded desert ground mount
4	RatedPower	Not publicly listed, quote only	Automated plant layout with shading-aware geometry	Strong	Testing configurations against a tender date
5	HelioScope	US$1,620/yr Basic, US$2,640 Pro (~SAR 6,075 to 9,900)	Hourly, component level	None	1 MW to 10 MW rooftop and C&I
6	Solargis	Prospect Basic EUR 2,400/yr (~SAR 9,720), Professional EUR 4,800, Evaluate EUR 12,000	Irradiance and site-specific soiling data	Data only	Getting the soiling number right
7	Aurora Solar	US$1,620/yr Basic, US$2,640 Premium (~SAR 6,075 to 9,900)	Hourly 3D irradiance engine	None	The small residential slice
8	Scanifly	Not publicly listed	Drone photogrammetry site model	Captures terrain, does not design it	Measured as-built geometry
9	Solmetric SunEye 210	US$2,195 base, North America (~SAR 8,230)	Fisheye sky-view field measurement	None	Settling a point dispute on site
10	Huawei FusionSolar Design	Not publicly listed	Hourly, per-optimiser and per-MPPT	None	Sizing the mitigation on vendor hardware

Note that SurgePV is the more expensive of the two engines at the top of that table. PVsyst at CHF 700 per user per year undercuts it, and Aurora Basic and HelioScope Basic at US$1,620 a year both undercut a SurgePV Individual seat at US$1,899. Read columns four and five together. This is the only market in our series where a rooftop-first ranking would be actively misleading, because the megawatts are on desert and half this list has never seen a tracker.

1. SurgePV

Best for: Saudi rooftop and C&I shading, and only that.

SurgePV builds a 3D site model from a satellite address and runs an 8,760-hour simulation at module level with string aggregation. The property that matters most in the Kingdom is that soiling is entered as a cleaning interval rather than a fixed percentage, so a monthly-washed Riyadh warehouse and a quarterly-washed Jubail plant produce genuinely different numbers, and the shading loss is reported as its own hourly line rather than folded into a general derate. That is what makes the separation this page argues for possible inside one report. Shadow analysis is on every paid plan rather than a top tier. Pricing is US$1,299 per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, about SAR 4,870, so US$6,495 or near SAR 24,350 for five seats, and a single Individual seat is US$1,899. PVsyst at CHF 700 per user per year is cheaper, and so is Aurora Basic at US$1,620 a year against a SurgePV Individual licence.

Named weaknesses, plainly, and they bite hard here. First, terrain-driven ground-mount layout is not at PVcase’s standard, which is a serious gap in a country where most of the megawatts sit on graded desert. Second, tracker and backtracking modelling is thinner than PVsyst’s, so for a single-axis plant the bankable shading number should come from PVsyst rather than from us. Third, no Saudi lender, technical advisor or NREP tender document names SurgePV, and several name PVsyst, so utility-scale teams run both and pay for both. Fourth, there is no field instrument or drone capture of its own, so obstruction and terrain geometry come from your survey discipline.

2. PVsyst

Best for: the tracker and backtracking number that a technical advisor will accept.

PVsyst models horizontal single-axis trackers with an explicit backtracking option, an unlimited-rows shading model for the interior of a large plant and a defined electrical shading effect that captures the mismatch penalty rather than only the irradiance loss. Its monthly soiling table is the other reason it belongs near the top here: you can enter a real Eastern Province dust profile month by month instead of averaging the shamal season into a misleading annual figure. Set alongside the loss diagram, that gives shading and soiling as two separately visible lines in the document everyone reads.

Pricing. CHF 700 per user per year for a Professional licence, about SAR 3,290. It is an annual subscription rather than a perpetual purchase, with Education at CHF 420, Training and Research at CHF 560 and group discounts of 5 to 20 percent by quantity. It costs less per seat than SurgePV.

Weakness. Terrain handling is workable rather than excellent, so on a genuinely undulating site the row geometry should be produced in PVcase and simulated in PVsyst. Scene building is slow, it is a desktop licence per machine, and it is an engineering instrument rather than a workflow. Our PVsyst alternative comparison covers where teams supplement it, and the P50, P90 and P99 explainer from our engineering sister company covers the yield-band vocabulary the loss diagram feeds.

3. PVcase

Best for: row and tracker geometry across graded desert, where it beats everything else on this list including us.

PVcase works inside CAD on the real terrain surface. It places rows against actual grade, respects tracker mechanical slope limits, and computes shading geometry against the ground as surveyed rather than against an assumed plane. On a Saudi site with wadi channels and partial grading, that is the difference between a plant that performs as modelled and one that under-backtracks along a slope for the first two hours of every winter day. If most of your megawatts are ground mount, this is the first purchase, ahead of any rooftop platform.

Weakness. CAD dependency, and PVcase publishes no pricing at all, so budgeting means getting a quote plus an AutoCAD licence rather than reading a number off a page. Any per-seat figure circulating in software directories is an unverified third-party estimate. Beyond cost: no rooftop relevance, no proposal output, and it is a layout engine rather than a full simulation engine, so it sits alongside PVsyst rather than replacing it.

4. RatedPower

Best for: a developer with a tender deadline and several plant configurations to test.

RatedPower automates utility-scale conceptual engineering: layout, civil works, cabling, substation arrangement and a preliminary bill of quantities, generated in hours. For shading specifically its value is that it will produce and compare row geometries at several ground coverage ratios against the same terrain and irradiance inputs, so the pitch decision becomes an evidenced trade rather than a house rule. On an NREP round with a fixed submission date, that is worth the licence.

Weakness. RatedPower, now part of Enverus, publishes no pricing, so it is quote only and any five-figure per-seat number you have seen quoted is an industry-observed estimate rather than a vendor figure. It is positioned at large developers, so expect the commercial conversation to assume a pipeline rather than a single project. The shading output is a byproduct of layout automation rather than a detailed shading study. The category case is in our utility-scale solar design software guide.

5. HelioScope

Best for: the 1 MW to 10 MW rooftop and C&I band, quickly.

HelioScope models shading, string layout and inverter selection together, so you see the mismatch consequence of an obstruction rather than only the irradiance loss. For a consultancy turning around several Dammam or Riyadh industrial roofs a week it is fast and accurate enough.

Pricing. Basic US$159 a month or US$1,620 a year, Pro US$259 a month or US$2,640 a year, each covering one user and 10 projects a month with DC design capped at 1.25 MW and 5 MW. Enterprise is quote only. That is roughly SAR 6,075 and SAR 9,900 a year.

Weakness. No terrain, no trackers, and soiling is a single flat factor rather than a monthly profile or an interval, which in the Eastern Province is a real limitation you have to remember to override. Our HelioScope alternative guide has the comparison.

6. Solargis

Best for: buying the soiling number instead of guessing it.

Solargis is a satellite-derived irradiance and meteorological data provider, not a layout tool, and it publishes site-specific soiling loss estimates alongside the time series. On a Saudi plant where the gap between a 6 percent and a 20 percent soiling assumption decides whether a performance commitment is achievable, paying for a measured-basis estimate is worth it. Feed the time series into PVsyst and model the geometry there.

Pricing. Solargis publishes no per-site price, so any per-site figure you have been quoted elsewhere is not a Solargis rate. Its published plans are annual: Prospect Basic EUR 2,400 a year covering 500 projects and 5 users, Prospect Professional EUR 4,800, and Evaluate EUR 12,000 a year for 60 early-stage projects. Prospect Enterprise and the Time Series API are not publicly listed. At SAR 4.05 to the euro, entry is roughly SAR 9,720 a year.

Weakness. No geometry, no layout, no trackers, no report. It answers one question and nothing else, and at EUR 2,400 a year for the entry plan rather than a small per-site fee, it only makes sense for a team with a steady pipeline.

7. Aurora Solar

Best for: the residential slice, which in the Kingdom is small.

Aurora has the deepest residential design and sales workflow in the category and a good irradiance engine. It ranks seventh here purely because Saudi Arabia does not yet have the residential volume to keep a seat busy, not because the product is weak or expensive.

Pricing. Basic US$135 per user per month billed annually or US$159 monthly, so US$1,620 a year, roughly SAR 6,075. Premium US$220 annually or US$259 monthly, so US$2,640 a year, roughly SAR 9,900. Enterprise custom. Both cover one user and 50 projects a month, plan sets are a separately priced service rather than a plan inclusion, and site models start at US$9.99. Aurora Basic is cheaper than a SurgePV Individual seat.

Weakness. LIDAR modelling, bankable shade reports and battery modelling are gated to Premium and LIDAR coverage over Saudi addresses is patchy anyway, so the Premium premium buys less here than in North America. No terrain and no tracker modelling. Our Aurora Solar alternative comparison covers the migration question.

8. Scanifly

Best for: measured as-built geometry when the model and the plant disagree.

Scanifly is drone photogrammetry. On a rooftop it measures plant and parapet heights. On a ground-mount site it produces a surface and an as-built row position set, which is the fastest way to find out whether the rows were actually installed at the pitch the model assumed. That question comes up more often than anyone likes on large desert builds.

Weakness. Scanifly publishes no pricing, so budgeting means a direct quote and the per-project and per-seat numbers in software directories are unverified third-party estimates. It also requires a pilot, a flight and Saudi drone permissions, and its own simulation depth trails the dedicated engines, so it is a geometry source feeding a model elsewhere. Our Scanifly pricing breakdown covers what is and is not published.

9. Solmetric SunEye 210

Best for: ending a point dispute in ten minutes.

The SunEye is a handheld fisheye instrument that photographs the sky dome from a point on the array and computes solar access there. On a rooftop or at the shaded end of a ground-mount block, a dated reading at the exact disputed position settles the argument faster than a re-simulation.

Pricing. US$2,195 base for North America, about SAR 8,230 before shipping and duty, including a lifetime PV Designer licence.

Weakness. Lead time rather than obsolescence is the constraint: the 210 is a current Solmetric product, not a discontinued one, but as of 2 August 2026 it is out of stock with a stated 10 to 12 week lead time, so order well ahead of a survey campaign. Solmetric has been a Fluke company since the acquisition announced on 12 September 2023. Beyond supply, it is a point measurement rather than an array simulation, and it says nothing about soiling, mismatch or trackers.

10. Huawei FusionSolar Design

Best for: sizing the mitigation on hardware you are already deploying.

Inverter-vendor tooling belongs here for one reason. Where shading is unavoidable, the recovery comes from module-level electronics or from fine MPPT granularity, and the vendor’s own designer is what shows you what the specific architecture actually recovers under partial shade. Huawei’s design tool is reached through an installer SmartPVMS account, and the equivalent SolarEdge and Sungrow tools apply the same way if that is your hardware.

Pricing. Huawei publishes no price or plan table for FusionSolar SmartDesign, so we are not going to describe it as free. Access runs through an installer SmartPVMS account, and what that costs, if anything, is a conversation with your Huawei distributor. SolarEdge Designer, by contrast, is genuinely free.

Weakness. It models the vendor’s own hardware and nothing else, so it is a mitigation-sizing tool and never an independent shading assessment. The absence of published pricing also makes it impossible to compare on cost.

Verdict. If your revenue is C&I self-consumption on Saudi roofs, buy SurgePV and add a PVsyst licence for anything financed. If your revenue is NREP-scale ground mount, the honest order is PVcase for the terrain and row geometry, PVsyst for the tracker and backtracking yield, and SurgePV third for the rooftop and distributed work those two do not cover. Buy a Solargis soiling dataset either way.

Mistakes Saudi Design Teams Make on Shading

1. 1
   Reporting soiling as shading. The most expensive mistake here, because it turns an operations and maintenance scope item into a design dispute and fixes neither.
2. 2
   Sizing row pitch on solstice noon. At Riyadh's latitude the shadow ratio roughly doubles three hours off noon. Size against the winter solar window instead.
3. 3
   Backtracking on a flat plane over sloping ground. It under-backtracks downslope and over-backtracks upslope, and only the second one is quiet about it.
4. 4
   Modelling a control strategy the tracker supplier will not commission. The yield model and the commissioned controller have to agree, and nobody checks until year one.
5. 5
   Using a 2 percent soiling default. That is a temperate-Europe figure. In the Eastern Province the cleaning interval, not the default, sets the number.
6. 6
   Applying a flat derate for shade. Bypass diode behaviour makes the loss non-linear, which is exactly why backtracking is worth its cosine cost.

The bypass diode entry explains the non-linearity in the last point, and the performance ratio entry explains how a mislabelled loss propagates into the metric an owner watches.

Building a Saudi Shading Report That Survives Review

1. Survey the ground before you draw a row. A terrain surface, not a satellite tile. On a graded site, get the as-graded surface rather than the pre-construction one.
2. Size pitch against the winter solar window, not solstice noon. State the window you used in the report.
3. Model backtracking against local slope. Per tracker where the terrain justifies it, and confirm the strategy matches what the tracker supplier will commission.
4. Enter soiling as a cleaning interval and method. Wet or robotic dry, and how often. Name it in the report.
5. Report shading and soiling as separate lines. Never one combined loss figure. This is the habit that prevents the misdiagnosis this page is about.
6. Run a sensitivity on both. Row pitch plus and minus 10 percent, and cleaning interval at the contracted and the realistic frequency. A technical advisor trusts a stated band far more than a single confident number.

Deployment and capacity context for the Kingdom is tracked by the IEA and IRENA, and both are useful for sanity-checking a plant’s assumed yield against what the market is actually achieving.

How Heaven Green Energy Helps

We build and operate solar plant, so we have been on both sides of this argument: the side that wrote the yield number and the side explaining a shortfall to an owner. Every step above came out of that rather than out of a brochure.

• Solar EPC services for turnkey engineering including yield and shading review.
• Industrial solar for large-roof and ground-mount work where row geometry decides the business case.
• Commercial solar for the C&I self-consumption segment.
• Heaven Designs ground-mount design when the terrain work needs an engineering team rather than another software seat.

For the wider stack, read the best solar design software in Saudi Arabia ranking and the best solar software in Saudi Arabia overview. The UAE shading ranking covers the same soiling correction from a rooftop and near-object angle, and the solar design software pillar frames the whole category.

Shading Analysis in Nearby Markets

Saudi Arabia shares the Gulf soiling problem with the UAE and the high-ambient derating question with India.

• Best solar shading analysis software in India
• Solar shading analysis software: the global guide

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Saudi solar underperformance usually shading or soiling?

Soiling, far more often than shading, and the Eastern Province is where the gap is widest. Shamal dust events can take a double-digit percentage off a month on an uncleaned array, while a competently laid-out plant carries a shading loss in the low single digits. Because both appear as a gap against the model, a tool that reports one combined loss bucket makes them indistinguishable, and the wrong fix gets applied.

How do I tell shading and soiling apart on a Saudi plant?

Two checks. Shading hits the same rows and strings at the same clock hours every day and drifts slowly with the season, while soiling pulls the whole plant down evenly across all daylight hours and climbs monotonically between cleans. And after a wash or a rain event, soiling recovers most of the gap in a single step while shading does not move at all. On a robotically cleaned plant the cleaning cycle gives you that second test every few days.

What is backtracking on a single-axis tracker?

It is a shading-avoidance control strategy. Early and late in the day the sun is low, so a tracker following the sun rotates to a steep angle and casts its shadow onto the row behind. Backtracking rotates the trackers back toward horizontal by exactly enough that each row’s shadow stops just short of the next row. You accept a small cosine loss and avoid a much larger mismatch loss, because a shadow crossing a row activates bypass diodes and drags the whole string down.

Why does terrain break backtracking?

Because the backtracking angle depends on the geometric relationship between adjacent rows, and slope changes that relationship. On sloping ground the effective pitch in the shadow direction differs from the plan-view pitch, so a flat-plane calculation errs both ways across the same site. Downslope the controller under-backtracks and the rows shade anyway, which is the expensive error. Upslope it over-backtracks and gives away cosine gain for shading that was never going to happen. Terrain-following backtracking computed per tracker is the fix.

What is the December solar noon elevation in Riyadh?

About 41.9 degrees, from 90 minus the 24.7N latitude minus the 23.44 degree solstice declination, which puts the shadow at roughly 1.12 times the object height. That figure is a poor design criterion on its own. Three hours either side of noon in late December the sun sits near 25 degrees and the shadow ratio rises to roughly 2.1 times, and it is that window rather than the noon instant that should set row pitch.

Which shading tool wins for Saudi utility-scale work?

Not SurgePV, and this page says so plainly. For terrain-aware row and tracker geometry on graded desert, PVcase is the best tool available and should be the first purchase for a ground-mount business. For the bankable tracker and backtracking yield number that a lender’s technical advisor expects, PVsyst is the document everybody reads. RatedPower earns its place where a developer needs to test several plant configurations against a tender deadline. SurgePV is the right answer for rooftop and C&I, which is a different business.

What soiling loss should I model in the Eastern Province?

Model the cleaning interval and the cleaning method, not a default percentage. Gulf arrays lose in the region of 1 percent per week during the dry season without cleaning, so monthly cleaning typically holds the annual figure in the mid single digits, quarterly cleaning drifts into the low teens and longer intervals can pass 20 percent, with shamal events worsening it further. Water scarcity pushes large plants toward robotic dry cleaning, which changes both the achievable interval and the racking design.

Does a Saudi tender require a shading report?

There is no regulation mandating one, no prescribed method and no approved tool list. The requirement is contractual. NREP-adjacent tender document lists and the technical advisors reviewing large power purchase agreements expect a PVsyst loss diagram, and the shading and soiling lines in it are read together. Distributed projects under the Saudi Electricity Regulatory Authority regime need accurate yield for sizing rather than for a bid.

How much does shading analysis software cost in Saudi Arabia?

Quote each vendor in the currency it bills in. SurgePV is US$1,299 per user per year on the 5-User Team plan with shading included, about SAR 4,870, so US$6,495 or roughly SAR 24,350 for five seats. PVsyst Professional is CHF 700 per user per year, about SAR 3,290, which makes it cheaper than SurgePV. HelioScope is US$1,620 to US$2,640 a year and Aurora Solar US$1,620 to US$2,640 on annual billing, both about SAR 6,075 to SAR 9,900. Solargis starts at EUR 2,400 a year for Prospect Basic, about SAR 9,720, and publishes no per-site price. A Solmetric SunEye 210 is US$2,195 base. PVcase, RatedPower, Scanifly and Huawei FusionSolar Design all publish no pricing at all. Because the riyal is pegged to the dollar, the USD figures carry no currency risk.