Solar Shading Analysis Software in Spain: Top 10 2026

If you are choosing solar shading analysis software Spain installers can actually defend in 2026, the hard problem is not the physics of a shadow. Spain has some of the best irradiance in Europe and a December sun high enough to make inter-row spacing comparatively forgiving. The hard problem is that a growing share of Spanish rooftop work is autoconsumo colectivo, where one array serves many participants under hourly reparto coefficients, and in that arrangement a shading loss stops being a single annual percentage. It becomes a per-participant, per-hour allocation question, and the tool that reports one array-level shading factor cannot tell participant 12 what they actually lost. Most tooling sold into Spain was designed in Germany, Switzerland or North America for one meter and one bill. The platform that wins our 2026 bench is SurgePV at roughly €1,180 (US$1,299) per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, and it does not win every axis. Below are ten shading and irradiance tools priced in euros, with named weaknesses on each including ours.

Direct answer. The best solar shading analysis software for Spain in 2026 is SurgePV, at about €1,180 per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, because it runs an 8,760-hour module-level shading simulation with bypass-diode physics and then reports the resulting loss through hourly reparto coefficients, so each colectivo participant sees their own shaded kWh. PVsyst remains the format a Spanish lender’s technical adviser asks for by name, and CYPE or dmELECT still owns the legalisation pack.

This guide is for instaladores, ingenierias and EPC design teams whose yield numbers get challenged by a customer, a comunidad de propietarios or a fund. It sits under our global pillar on solar shading analysis software and alongside the wider solar design software Spain ranking, which covers the full design workflow rather than shading alone.

Why One Annual Shading Factor Fails an Autoconsumo Colectivo

Here is the angle that makes Spanish shading analysis genuinely different from German or Dutch shading analysis, and it has nothing to do with latitude.

In a single-meter job, a shading study answers one question: how many kWh does the array lose in a year. The answer is a number, the customer either accepts it or does not, and the argument ends. In autoconsumo colectivo the array is shared. Several participants sit behind one CAU code, each keeps their own CUPS and their own supply contract, and production is divided by reparto coefficients that must allocate the whole output for every hour of the year. Those coefficients can be fixed or they can vary hour by hour.

Now put a chimney, a caja de ascensor or a neighbouring block on that roof. The shadow does not fall evenly across the day. It sweeps. Between 09:00 and 11:00 in January it takes out the eastern third of the array, and by 15:00 it has moved off entirely. Feed that into a fixed reparto and the shading loss is shared proportionally, which is defensible. Feed it into an hourly reparto, which is what a mixed community of an office, a bakery and fourteen flats actually needs, and the shading loss lands overwhelmingly on whichever participants hold the high morning coefficients. The bakery, which took the early hours precisely because it bakes early, eats almost the entire morning shadow. The flats, whose coefficients peak in the evening, barely notice it.

An array-level annual shading factor of, say, 6.2 percent cannot express any of that. Applied uniformly it tells the bakery it lost 6.2 percent when the honest figure might be 14 percent, and tells the flats they lost 6.2 percent when they lost 2. Both numbers are wrong, the reparto agreement is signed on them, and the disagreement surfaces on the first quarterly bill rather than in the design office.

The requirement this creates is specific and testable. A Spanish shading tool has to keep the loss time-resolved all the way through to the participant, rather than collapsing it to an annual figure before the reparto is applied. That ordering is the whole thing. Collapse first, allocate second, and the answer is arithmetically clean and practically useless. Allocate first, then sum, and every participant gets a defensible number. Very little software on the market does it in that order, because very few markets asked for it.

Why an Hour of Shading Loss Is Not Worth a Fixed Price in Spain

The second Spanish distinction is financial, and it also argues for time resolution over an annual factor.

Under compensacion simplificada de excedentes, surplus exported energy is compensated monthly against the energy term of the bill, and the compensation can never exceed that energy term. The bill cannot go negative, and unused value does not carry into the next month. Once a participant’s monthly energy term is fully cancelled, every additional exported kWh earns exactly zero.

Follow the consequence for shading. Take a 20 kWp array on a Valencia roof whose owner has already cancelled the energy term by the third week of every summer month. A shadow that removes 40 kWh in the last week of July removes surplus that was earning nothing. The financial cost of that shading loss is zero euros. Now move the same 40 kWh loss to 12:00 on a working Tuesday in February, when the same building is drawing from the array. That energy was displacing grid import at the full retail price including network charges and taxes. The cost is the whole retail rate.

Same kWh. Same shadow geometry. Two completely different euro figures. An annual shading percentage multiplied by an annual average energy price cannot see the difference, and it is not a small difference. On self-consumption-heavy commercial sites we routinely see the economic weight of a given geometric shade vary by a factor of two or more depending on which hours it lands in.

This is a genuinely useful thing to be able to show a client. The persuasive Spanish shading output is not “you lose 6.2 percent”. It is “you lose 6.2 percent of kWh and 3.1 percent of euros, and here are the eleven midday winter hours that account for most of the euros, which is why we are moving that string off the shaded plane”. Our shading loss glossary entry sets out the underlying electrical mechanism, and the proposal software ranking for Spain covers how that story reaches the customer document.

Key takeaway. In Spain the value of a shading study is time resolution, twice over. Once because the euro value of a lost kWh depends entirely on whether it was self-consumed or surplus under the compensacion ceiling, and once because a colectivo has to allocate that loss to a named participant in a named hour.

The 2x Shadow Rule at 40.4 Degrees North

The geometry is the supporting argument rather than the headline, but it matters because Spanish installers are frequently sold tooling whose defaults were tuned for northern Europe.

Solar noon elevation at the winter solstice is 90 minus site latitude minus the earth’s axial tilt of 23.44 degrees. Run it for the four cities that bracket the Spanish and Italian market:

City	Latitude	December solar noon	Shadow multiple	GCR at 30° south
Palermo	38.1° N	28.5°	1.85x	0.56
Madrid	40.4° N	26.2°	2.04x	0.53
Rome	41.9° N	24.7°	2.18x	0.51
Milan	45.5° N	21.1°	2.60x	0.46
Berlin	52.5° N	14.1°	3.99x	0.35

In Madrid the tangent of 26.16 degrees is 0.4913, so every object casts a December-noon shadow about 2.04 times its own height. A 2 m chimney reaches 4.1 m. In Berlin the same chimney reaches 8 m. That is the number a northern-designed default gets wrong, and it gets it wrong in the expensive direction: it tells you to space rows almost twice as far apart as the site actually needs.

Work the ground coverage ratio properly. Take a standard module 1.134 m across, mounted horizontally at 30 degrees facing south on a flat Madrid roof. Row height is 1.134 times the sine of 30 degrees, which is 0.567 m. December-noon shadow is 0.567 times 2.04, which is 1.16 m. The row itself occupies 1.134 times the cosine of 30 degrees, which is 0.98 m. Minimum pitch is 1.16 plus 0.98, which is 2.14 m, and the GCR is 1.134 divided by 2.14, which is 0.53.

A German-derived assumption would hand you 0.35. On a 1,000 square metre nave roof in Getafe that difference is roughly 50 percent more installed kWp for identical zero-shading-at-winter-noon performance. Put another way, applying Berlin spacing in Madrid leaves about a third of the achievable capacity on the table, and the customer pays for the mounting steel either way.

Top 10 Shading Analysis Tools in Spain Compared

Pricing is each vendor’s own published 2026 list price in the currency they bill in, annualised. Where a euro figure converts a dollar price the rate used is roughly €0.91 per US dollar. Treat converted figures as indicative and confirm with the vendor.

#	Tool	Published price	Shading capability	Best for
1	SurgePV	US$1,299/user/yr (about €1,180)	8,760-hr module-level with bypass diodes, loss carried through hourly reparto	Instaladores and EPCs selling colectivo
2	PVsyst	CHF 700/user/yr, Professional	Near-shading plus horizon file, documented loss tree	Bank and fund technical advisers
3	PV*SOL premium	€845/named user/yr + VAT (standard PV*SOL €585)	Animated 3D shading walkthrough, best client artefact	Ingenierias selling in the living room
4	HelioScope	Basic US$159/mo (US$1,620/yr); Pro US$259/mo (US$2,640/yr)	Module-level C&I simulation with a clean loss tree	Naves industriales and consultancies
5	Scanifly	Not publicly listed, quote only	Drone photogrammetry to a measured 3D shading model	Dense casco antiguo roofs and tree cover
6	Solmetric SunEye 210	US$2,195 base, North America	Measured fisheye horizon at a physical point	Disputes with a comunidad or a neighbour
7	Aurora Solar	Basic US$135/user/mo billed annually (US$1,620/yr); Premium US$220 (US$2,640/yr)	Strong residential shade rendering, LIDAR and shade reports on Premium	Multinationals already on Aurora
8	PVGIS horizon import	Free	Far-horizon terrain profile fed into another engine	Sierra, meseta edge and valley sites
9	Polysun	Not publicly listed, quote only	Shading inside a coupled PV and aerotermia model	Renovation and sector-coupling work
10	CYPE / dmELECT	CYPE one €64 to €125/user/mo paid annually; dmELECT not publicly listed	Effectively none, listed because Spanish readers ask	The legalisation pack, not shading

State the uncomfortable part of that table rather than working around it: two of the engines we rank below SurgePV cost less than SurgePV. PVsyst Professional is CHF 700 per user per year, so five seats are CHF 3,500 against US$6,495 for five SurgePV seats, and PV*SOL Premium is €845 per named user, or €4,225 for five, against about €5,900. SurgePV wins this ranking on the reparto and compensacion handling described above, and on nothing to do with being cheap.

The honest read: positions 1 to 4 are the real shading choice for a Spanish firm. Positions 5, 6 and 8 are measurement inputs that feed the others rather than competitors to them. Position 10 is on the list to answer a question, not to be bought for this job.

1. SurgePV

What it does best. SurgePV runs an 8,760-hour shading simulation at module level with bypass-diode physics on every paid plan, and then, crucially for Spain, carries the hourly loss forward instead of collapsing it. The array is shaded hour by hour, the hourly reparto coefficients are applied to the shaded production, and each participant’s own shaded kWh falls out of the arithmetic. That is the ordering that lets you tell the bakery it loses 14 percent while the fourth-floor flat loses 2, and it is the number a reparto negotiation should actually turn on. On top of that it separates self-consumed losses from surplus-hour losses and prices them differently against the compensacion simplificada ceiling, so the euro cost of a shadow is not a blended average. The 3D roof and its obstructions come from satellite imagery in about a minute, the per-module annual loss heatmap drives string and MPPT grouping, and the result flows into the REBT-labelled unifilar and the Spanish presupuesto without a re-import.

Pricing. €1,180 (US$1,299) per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, so €5,900 for five seats. Individual seats about €1,730 per year. Free trial, no credit card.

Who it suits. Instaladores and EPCs running five or more designs a month, and specifically anyone whose colectivo reparto coefficients are currently negotiated on an annual average.

Honest limitations. Four concrete ones. It cannot import a measured horizon file from a Solmetric SunEye or a fisheye photograph, so on a site under a real sierra ridge you are relying on modelled terrain rather than a reading somebody took on the roof. It has no drone photogrammetry ingest, so mature vegetation and tightly packed casco antiguo geometry are modelled from satellite rather than from a Scanifly point cloud, and satellite imagery is the weakest input on narrow streets with tall party walls. Its shading visualisation is accurate but static, where PV*SOL’s animated walkthrough is what persuades a comunidad de propietarios meeting. And on financed work a fund’s technical adviser has never seen its report format, where a PVsyst near-shading study needs no explanation at all.

Book a SurgePV demo and bring a real colectivo with an awkward obstruction, not a clean roof, because a clean roof tells you nothing about a shading engine.

2. PVsyst

What it does best. PVsyst is the reference. Its near-shading model, its separate far-horizon handling, its electrical shading loss treatment and its documented loss tree are what everything else is benchmarked against, ours included. On any financed Spanish plant the technical adviser asks for a PVsyst report by name, and the near-shading section is the part they read first. On lender-specified bankability it beats SurgePV and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Heaven Designs published a walkthrough of how to read a PVsyst loss diagram if you have to defend one line by line.

Pricing. CHF 700 per user per year for the Professional edition, an annual subscription rather than a perpetual licence, with Education at CHF 420 and group discounts of 5 to 20 percent by quantity. That is less than SurgePV costs per seat.

Who it suits. Technical due diligence teams, independent engineers and ground-mount developers in Extremadura and Castilla-La Mancha.

Honest limitations. Windows desktop, a steep learning curve, and slow manual construction of the 3D shading scene. For Spain specifically it has no concept of autoconsumo colectivo at all, so reparto coefficients, per-participant allocation and the compensacion ceiling live in a spreadsheet next to it. It produces no REBT documentation and no customer-facing artefact. See our PVsyst alternative comparison.

3. PV*SOL premium

What it does best. The animated 3D shading walkthrough is the best client-facing shading explanation on this list, and it is not close. You place the chimney, the caja de ascensor and the neighbouring block, then play the year and watch the shadow move. In a comunidad de propietarios meeting where twenty owners are voting on whether to fund a colectivo, that animation does work no heatmap can do, because it pre-empts the “why does the array stop there” objection in front of everyone at once.

Pricing. €845 per named user per year plus VAT for PVSOL Premium, with standard PVSOL at €585. This is a user-based subscription, not a perpetual licence with an update service: Valentin Software stopped selling perpetual licences on 19 November 2024 and maintenance renewals on existing perpetual licences ended on 1 October 2024, although those licences still run. At €845 a seat it is cheaper than SurgePV.

Who it suits. Ingenierias and instaladores who win residential and comunidad work in the meeting rather than in the inbox.

Honest limitations. Windows desktop only, so nothing usable from a phone on a roof in Murcia and no live collaboration. No satellite-derived 3D roof capture, so every obstruction is placed by hand. Its financial module is built around German feed-in logic, so the compensacion simplificada ceiling has to be rebuilt manually and reparto coefficients are outside its model entirely. Our PV*SOL alternative guide covers where a switch pays.

4. HelioScope

What it does best. Module-level 8,760-hour simulation for commercial roofs with a clean, exportable loss tree that Spanish independent engineers accept without argument. On a 400 kWp nave industrial roof in Zaragoza its handling of mutual row shading is good and the report is fast to produce.

Pricing. Basic is US$159 per month, US$1,620 a year, for one user and 10 projects a month with a 1.25 MW DC design cap. Pro is US$259 per month, US$2,640 a year, with a 5 MW cap. Five Basic seats come to about US$8,100, roughly €7,400.

Who it suits. Consultancies and C&I-only teams whose deliverable is a yield report rather than a presupuesto.

Honest limitations. No Spanish regulatory layer, no REBT labelling, no RD 244/2019 branching and no colectivo modelling whatsoever. Obstruction modelling on complex pitched urban roofs is coarser than PV*SOL. Read our HelioScope alternative guide before committing five seats.

5. Scanifly

What it does best. Scanifly turns a drone flight into a photogrammetric 3D model of the actual site, then runs shading against that measured geometry rather than an operator’s guess. This matters more in Spain than the sunshine suggests, because a large share of Spanish residential stock sits in dense town centres where the dominant shading object is a neighbouring party wall or a tower whose height nobody on the ground can estimate to within three metres.

Pricing. Scanifly does not publish a price list. Pricing is quoted and scales with tier and capture volume, so ask them rather than budgeting from a directory figure. See our Scanifly pricing breakdown for what the quote usually turns on.

Who it suits. Firms already flying drones, and anyone whose shading disputes come down to a neighbouring building or mature vegetation.

Honest limitations. You need a drone, a pilot and permission to fly, which in Spain means EU drone rules plus AESA requirements and, in urban areas, real constraints. It is a capture tool rather than a design suite or a financial model, so it sits alongside your main platform. Its output has no concept of reparto or compensacion. Our Scanifly alternative piece covers the workflow tradeoff.

6. Solmetric SunEye 210

What it does best. A handheld fisheye instrument that photographs the whole sky dome from one point on the roof and overlays the annual sun path, producing a measured horizon and a monthly solar access percentage for that exact spot. When a comunidad member, an adjacent owner or a customer disputes a shading claim, a reading taken on the roof settles it in a way no simulation does.

Pricing. US$2,195 base for North America, about €2,000, as a one-off instrument purchase including a lifetime PV Designer licence. It is a current product bought new: Solmetric has been a Fluke company since the acquisition announced in September 2023 and still sells the 210. As of 2 August 2026 it is out of stock with a stated 10 to 12 week lead time.

Who it suits. Audit teams, expert witnesses, and firms negotiating over a neighbour’s tree or a proposed extension.

Honest limitations. The current 10 to 12 week lead time is the practical obstacle, and import from North America adds cost and time on a Spanish order. It measures one point, so a large roof needs several readings. It outputs solar access percentages rather than an energy model, so the result still has to be carried into a simulation engine.

7. Aurora Solar

What it does best. Aurora’s irradiance map is the most persuasive shading visual you can put in front of a Spanish residential customer, and its automatic roof plane detection handles the tiled hip-and-valley geometry of a typical chalet adosado without much manual correction. The shade report renders cleanly into a Spanish-language proposal, which matters when the buyer is comparing three quotes on presentation quality.

Pricing. Basic is US$135 per user per month billed annually, US$1,620 a year, and Premium US$220 annually, US$2,640 a year. Enterprise is quoted. Plan sets are a separately priced service rather than a plan inclusion, and site models start at US$9.99. Aurora Basic works out near €1,475 a year, cheaper than a SurgePV Individual seat at about €1,730.

Who it suits. Multinational installers extending an existing Aurora process into Spain.

Honest limitations. LIDAR modelling and bankable shade reports sit on Premium rather than Basic, and plan sets are charged as a separate service, so the headline Basic price is not what a shading-led workflow ends up paying. The Spanish layer is thin: no RD 244/2019 branching, no compensacion ceiling, no reparto coefficients. LIDAR coverage is also far better in North America than in Spain. See our Aurora Solar alternative comparison.

8. PVGIS Horizon Import

What it does best. This is not a design tool, it is a horizon and irradiance input. The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre publishes PVGIS free, including a terrain horizon profile for any Spanish coordinate, which imports straight into PVsyst or PV*SOL. Spain has serious terrain: the Sierra de Guadarrama, the Cantabrian range, the Sistema Iberico and countless valley towns in Asturias and the Pyrenees, where the far horizon cuts winter production more than every chimney on the roof combined.

Pricing. Free. Meteonorm sells a commercial equivalent with finer modelling, published at CHF 675 for a single perpetual licence and CHF 350 per additional licence (about €720 at CHF 1 to €1.07, approximate and rate-dependent).

Who it suits. Anyone designing in a valley, on a north-facing slope, or at the foot of a sierra.

Honest limitations. Terrain horizon only. It knows nothing about the chimney, the lift housing or the neighbouring block, which is where most Spanish urban shading loss actually lives. It complements a near-shading engine rather than replacing one.

9. Polysun

What it does best. Vela Solaris built Polysun around coupled systems, so a shading loss lands in the same model as the aerotermia unit, the storage and the hot water. As Spanish renovation projects increasingly bundle a heat pump with the array, seeing how a shaded array changes the self-consumption fraction of the whole system is genuinely useful, and self-consumption fraction is exactly the variable the compensacion ceiling makes decisive.

Pricing. Vela Solaris does not publish a price list. Polysun is sold either as a one-off purchase with an annual service subscription or as a lease with a 12-month minimum, both quoted. A €699 figure circulates in software directories and traces back to a 2013 price list, so treat it as obsolete rather than current.

Who it suits. Ingenierias doing renovation and sector-coupling work.

Honest limitations. Shading is a component of a larger simulation rather than the focus. The 3D obstruction editor is weaker than PV*SOL’s, there is no client-facing animation, no reparto logic and no sales document. If you never touch heat, it is the wrong purchase.

10. CYPE and dmELECT

What it does best. CYPE, from Alicante, and dmELECT are the Spanish engineering software houses whose products produce the legalisation pack: REBT and ITC-BT-40 calculations, the memoria tecnica de diseno or proyecto, and the documentation a Comunidad Autonoma industry office expects. For an ingenieria whose deliverable is a stamped file, they do the part nothing else does.

Pricing. CYPE sells an annual subscription and publishes CYPE one at €64 per user per month on GO, €89 on PRO and €125 on MAX, all paid annually, with CYPELEC PV Systems bundled into PRO and MAX. dmELECT publishes no purchase price on its own site; its FAQ states the licence is perpetual with an optional maintenance contract at €160 plus IVA a year.

Who it suits. Ingenierias and technical offices producing proyectos and memorias.

Honest limitations. For shading specifically, effectively nothing. No 8,760-hour simulation, no near-shading geometry engine, no horizon handling, no per-module loss. They are here because Spanish readers searching for shading software repeatedly land on them, and the honest answer is that they are calculation and documentation environments that sit alongside a shading tool rather than performing the job. Nobody should buy CYPE to analyse shade, and nobody should expect a PV platform to replace it for legalisation either.

Get your sizing sanity-checked. For a fast independent second opinion on system size and payback before you finalise a shaded layout, run the numbers through our free solar calculator or talk to our engineering team.

The Reparto Shading Test: Six Checks Before You Sign

This is the framework we run on our own solar EPC work before a shaded Spanish colectivo design leaves the office. Run any tool you are evaluating through all six with a real project, not a demo file.

1. Does the loss stay hourly until after the reparto is applied? Ask the vendor to show the order of operations. If the tool computes an annual shading factor and then splits it by coefficient, the per-participant answer is wrong by construction. Shade the array hourly, allocate hourly, then sum.
2. Can you see a per-participant shaded-kWh figure? Not a share of a group total. Participant 12’s own number, for their own hours, under their own coefficients. That is the figure the reparto agreement should be negotiated against.
3. Is the euro value split between self-consumed and surplus hours? A kWh lost while the participant’s monthly energy term is already cancelled is worth nothing under compensacion simplificada. Any tool that applies one average price to shaded kWh is overstating the cost of shade on export-heavy sites and understating it on midday-heavy ones.
4. Can you re-run coefficients against the shaded profile and compare? The useful output is a comparison: coefficients A versus coefficients B, with each participant’s shaded kWh and euro impact side by side. If you cannot iterate in minutes, you will not iterate at all.
5. Check the far horizon separately. Import a PVGIS profile for the coordinate. In a valley in Asturias or under the Guadarrama, terrain can remove the first and last hour of winter production entirely, and no near-shading model will tell you.
6. Confirm the sky model is anisotropic and the loss is module level. Perez or Hay-Davies, never isotropic, and bypass-diode physics rather than an area percentage. A roof with 8 percent geometric shade routinely loses 15 to 22 percent of annual energy once mismatch is counted.

Mistakes Spanish Instaladores Make in Shading Analysis

1. 1
   Applying one array shading factor across a colectivo. It hands every participant the same percentage when the shadow sweeps across the day and the coefficients do not. The participants holding morning coefficients are systematically short-changed, and it surfaces on the first bill.
2. 2
   Pricing every shaded kWh at the same rate. Under the compensacion ceiling a surplus-hour loss can be worth nothing while a midday winter loss costs full retail including network charges. Blend them and the mitigation budget goes to the wrong string.
3. 3
   Importing a northern European row-spacing default. Madrid needs 2.04 times obstruction height at winter noon, not 4.0. Berlin spacing on a Spanish roof leaves roughly a third of the achievable capacity unbuilt on the same mounting footprint.
4. 4
   Guessing the height of the building next door. In a dense casco antiguo the dominant obstruction is a party wall or an adjacent block, and a three metre error changes the winter answer completely. Measure it, fly it, or take a fisheye reading.
5. 5
   Telling a client a shading study is legally required. RD 244/2019 mandates no such thing and Spain has no MCS-style shading factor. Sell it on accuracy and on the reparto negotiation it protects, not on an invented regulation.

The wider set of process failures is covered in our writeup on common mistakes EPC companies make in rooftop solar, and the full Spanish software stack guide puts shading in the context of the other tools you will buy.

Where PVsyst, PV*SOL and CYPE Still Beat SurgePV

Verdict. For a Spanish firm selling colectivo and commercial rooftop at volume, SurgePV wins because it keeps the shading loss time-resolved through the reparto and prices it against the compensacion ceiling, which is the one thing the market genuinely needs and the imported tools genuinely do not do. For bankable reports PVsyst stays, for a comunidad meeting PV*SOL stays, and for the legalisation file CYPE stays. Two licences is a reasonable answer in Spain and we would say so on a sales call.

How Heaven Green Energy and SurgePV Help Spanish Teams

Heaven Green Energy has delivered more than 10,000 solar installations, and our engineering group builds the software our own designers use. SurgePV came out of that, written by people who had to defend a yield number to a customer who could see the obstruction from their own window. For Spanish teams the entry points are:

• Shadow analysis for the 8,760-hour module-level simulation and the per-participant shaded-kWh output.
• Heaven Designs PVsyst resource centre when the deliverable has to be a PVsyst report rather than a proposal.
• Dual MPPT versus single MPPT for the inverter side of a shaded string plan.

If you run projects beyond Spain, our commercial solar and industrial solar pages set out how the same design stack carries across markets. Wider deployment context sits with the IEA renewables tracker, IRENA country profiles and IDAE.

Related Shading and Design Software Guides

• Solar Shading Analysis Software: The Global Guide
• Solar Shading Analysis Software in Italy
• Solar Shading Analysis Software in Germany
• Solar Shading Analysis Software in the UK
• Best Solar Design Software in Spain
• Best Solar Proposal Software in Spain
• Best Solar Software in Spain: The Full Stack
• Best Solar Design Software: The Global Ranking
• PV Yield Simulation Software Compared
• Commercial Solar Design Software Compared

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best solar shading analysis software for Spain in 2026?

SurgePV ranks first, at about €1,180 per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, because it runs an 8,760-hour module-level shading simulation with bypass-diode physics and then applies hourly reparto coefficients to the shaded production, so each autoconsumo colectivo participant gets their own shaded-kWh figure. It also splits the loss between self-consumption hours and surplus hours capped by compensacion simplificada. PVsyst ranks second and remains the format a Spanish lender’s adviser asks for by name. PV*SOL ranks third for its animated walkthrough.

Why does autoconsumo colectivo change the shading question?

Because the loss has to be allocated, not just measured. Several participants share one array under one CAU code with hourly reparto coefficients that must allocate all production. A shadow sweeps across the day, so it does not hit every hour equally, and participants holding high morning coefficients absorb a morning shadow almost entirely. An array-level annual shading factor spreads the loss uniformly and therefore misstates every participant’s number. The tool has to shade hourly, allocate hourly, then sum.

Is a shading study legally required in Spain?

No. Real Decreto 244/2019 sets the administrative, technical and economic conditions for self-consumption and defines the reparto mechanism, but it does not mandate a shading study, a shading factor or any method for producing one. Spain has nothing equivalent to the UK MCS Standard Estimation Method. The pressure is commercial: a comunidad de propietarios voting on a colectivo, a lender funding a commercial roof, or a customer comparing presupuestos. Never present it to a client as a legal obligation.

How long is a winter shadow in Spain?

At Madrid’s latitude of 40.4 degrees north the sun reaches about 26.2 degrees at solar noon on 21 December, which is 90 minus 40.4 minus the earth’s 23.44 degree axial tilt. Shadow length is height divided by the tangent of that elevation, so every object casts a shadow about 2.04 times its own height. A 2 m chimney reaches 4.1 m. The same chimney in Berlin reaches 8 m, which is why a northern European row-spacing default wastes Spanish roof area.

What ground coverage ratio does a Spanish flat roof support?

For south-facing rows at 30 degrees using a 1.134 m module in horizontal orientation, the row stands 0.567 m high, casts a 1.16 m December-noon shadow in Madrid and occupies 0.98 m of horizontal depth, giving a minimum pitch of 2.14 m and a ground coverage ratio of about 0.53. Berlin’s equivalent figure is 0.35. On the same roof that is roughly 50 percent more installed kWp, though higher density also raises cell temperature, which costs output in a Spanish July.

Does the compensacion simplificada ceiling really change shading value?

Yes, and it is the reason time resolution matters financially. Surplus is compensated monthly against the energy term of the bill and can never take that term below zero. Once a participant’s monthly energy term is cancelled, further exported kWh earn nothing, so a shading loss falling in those hours costs zero euros. The same kWh lost at midday in February, when it would have displaced retail-priced grid import including network charges, costs the full retail rate.

Does SurgePV replace PVsyst for a Spanish bank report?

Not yet, and we would say so on a sales call. SurgePV launched in 2025, so a fund’s technical adviser or a bank engineer reviewing a financed Spanish plant has never seen its report format, where a PVsyst near-shading study and loss diagram need no introduction. The physics is comparable and the colectivo modelling is better. The recognition is not. Firms doing financed commercial work commonly run SurgePV for design and colectivo work and keep a PVsyst licence for the yield report.

Do CYPE or dmELECT do shading analysis?

Not in any meaningful sense. Both are Spanish engineering calculation and documentation environments built around the REBT and ITC-BT-40, and they produce the memoria tecnica de diseno or proyecto that a Comunidad Autonoma industry office expects. They contain no 8,760-hour simulation, no near-shading geometry engine and no per-module loss modelling. They belong in a Spanish software stack, and they sit alongside a shading tool rather than replacing one. A PV platform does not replace them for legalisation either.