Best Solar Shading Analysis Software UAE: Top 10 2026

If you are picking solar shading analysis software in the UAE for 2026, the most valuable thing this page can tell you is that the loss you are trying to model is probably not shading. On Gulf rooftops the single most common diagnostic error we see is a soiling loss written up as a shading loss, and once that mislabel is in the report it drives the wrong fix: somebody reroutes a string or argues about a parapet when the array simply needed washing on a schedule. Shading and soiling both cost energy, both show up as underperformance against a model, and in a tool that reports one combined loss bucket they are genuinely indistinguishable. Separating them is the job. Across our own installed base at Heaven Green Energy the platform our design team standardises on is SurgePV at AED 4,770 (US$1,299) per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, and this ranking names three places where it loses outright.

Direct answer. The best solar shading analysis software in the UAE for 2026 is SurgePV at about AED 4,770 per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, because it runs an 8,760-hour module-level shading simulation and takes a cleaning interval as a soiling input rather than a fixed European default, which is what lets you tell the two losses apart. PVsyst remains the tool named in Gulf project finance documents, Solargis is the better source for a site-specific soiling estimate, and Scanifly or a Solmetric SunEye reading is what settles an argument about a plant-room shadow on site.

This guide is written for UAE designers, consultants and C&I engineering managers whose yield numbers are being challenged. It ranks ten tools on shading and irradiance modelling specifically, not on general design. The wider platform decision lives in our best solar design software in UAE ranking, and the physics common to every market is in the solar shading analysis software pillar.

Shading Versus Soiling: The Correction That Matters Most in the Gulf

This is the section to read even if you buy nothing. In temperate markets soiling is a rounding error and shading is the interesting variable, so the global tools were built with that weighting and the habits followed the tools. In the UAE the weighting is reversed for most rooftop arrays, and the inherited habit produces confident, wrong diagnoses.

Start with what each loss actually is. Shading is an optical geometry problem: some object blocks the beam component of irradiance from part of the array at a particular sun position. Soiling is a surface transmission problem: dust, cement dust from nearby construction, salt aerosol near the coast and bird droppings reduce how much light reaches the cell across the whole glass surface. They are different physics and they leave different fingerprints.

Signature	Shading	Soiling
Spatial pattern	Fixed and local. The same modules and the same strings, every time	Diffuse. The whole array, with edge and low-tilt accumulation heavier
Time of day	Sharp edges at repeatable clock hours, tracking the sun path	Flat. Present in the same proportion 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 immediately, often within a day
Seasonal shape	Worst near the December solstice when the sun is lowest	Worst in the dry, dusty months regardless of sun position
Electrical fingerprint	Non-linear. Bypass diodes conduct, string mismatch amplifies the loss well past the shaded area fraction	Roughly linear current reduction, mismatch only where deposition is very uneven
The fix	Move modules, re-string, add module-level electronics, or remove the object	Change the cleaning interval

The Two-Question Field Test for a UAE Underperforming Array

You do not need a laboratory to tell the two apart. You need string-level data and two questions.

Question one: is the gap the same shape every day? Pull four weeks of string-level power at fifteen minute resolution and normalise each string against the best-performing string on the same roof. A shading loss shows as a repeating notch at the same clock hours on the same subset of strings, with the notch drifting a few minutes per week as the sun path moves. A soiling loss shows as every string sliding down together, with no intraday structure.

Question two: what happens the day after a wash? Note the array output on a clear day before a scheduled clean and on the next clear day after it. Soiling recovers almost all of the gap in that step. Shading does not move at all. If you have no cleaning event to use, the rare Gulf rain event does the same job for free, though a light rain that only wets and redistributes dust can briefly make things worse before it makes them better.

Run those two checks before you touch the model. Roughly speaking, if the whole array is down uniformly and it steps back after a wash, you have a cleaning contract problem and no amount of shading software will find it. If two strings on the south-west corner dip between 14:00 and 16:00 every single day, you have the chiller deck.

Why the UAE Barely Has an Inter-Row Spacing Problem

Dubai sits at roughly 25.2N. At the December solstice, solar declination is about 23.44 degrees south, so solar noon elevation is approximately 90 minus 25.2 minus 23.44, which is about 41.3 degrees. Shadow length is obstruction height divided by the tangent of that elevation, so a 1 metre obstruction casts about 1.14 metres of shadow at the worst hour of the year.

City	Latitude	Dec solar noon elevation	Shadow per 1 m of height
Abu Dhabi	24.4N	42.2 degrees	1.10 m
Dubai	25.2N	41.3 degrees	1.14 m
Ras Al Khaimah	25.8N	40.8 degrees	1.16 m
London, for contrast	51.5N	15.1 degrees	3.72 m
Berlin, for contrast	52.5N	14.1 degrees	3.99 m

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

Work the consequence. A flat-roof C&I array at 10 degrees tilt using 2.1 metre modules in portrait presents about 0.36 metres of vertical height. Clearing that at Dubai December solar noon needs roughly 0.41 metres of clear spacing between rows. The identical array in Berlin needs about 1.45 metres. That is why a European ground coverage ratio rule of thumb wastes a large fraction of an Emirati roof, and why inter-row spacing is simply not the interesting shading variable here.

Two caveats keep this honest. Solar noon is the best hour of the day, not the whole day: at 08:00 in late December a Dubai roof still sees the sun at a low elevation and near-object shadows stretch several times their noon length, which is exactly when a parapet on the eastern edge bites. And none of the noon arithmetic applies to a tall object close to the array, which has to be modelled hour by hour rather than reasoned about with a ratio.

Rooftop Plant Is the Real UAE Shading Problem

Walk any Dubai commercial roof and count what is up there before the panels arrive. Chillers and condenser banks. Air handling units on plinths. Duct runs and insulated pipe racks. Lift motor rooms and stair overruns. Water tanks. Satellite dishes and telecom masts leased to a third party. A 1.2 metre parapet on all four edges, which at December solar noon takes a 1.37 metre strip out of the northern edge of the roof and far more in the first and last hours of the day.

These objects share three properties that make them harder to model than a tree.

They are tall relative to their distance. A 2.5 metre chiller two metres from the first row is a total block on those modules for part of the day, not a partial dimming. The loss is non-linear because bypass diodes conduct and the whole string current collapses toward the shaded module. See our bypass diode and string current mismatch glossary entries for the mechanism.

They move. Building management replaces a chiller with a taller unit, adds a new AHU, or lets a telecom tenant put a mast where the modules used to see clear sky. A shading model built at design stage and never revisited is describing a roof that no longer exists.

They are not on the satellite image at the right height. Overhead imagery shows the footprint of a plant room, not how tall it is. Estimating that height from a shadow in a single satellite tile is a common shortcut and a common source of a metre of error, which on a close object is the difference between clearing the first row and not.

Adjacent towers are the second category, and in Business Bay, Jumeirah Lake Towers and the Marina they are decisive. A neighbouring 80 metre tower directly south of a low-rise roof casts about 91 metres of shadow at December solar noon. That is not a shading loss to be modelled at module level, that is a site to be declined or a roof area to be excluded, and the value of the software is telling you which of the two before you price the job.

Where DEWA Rules Touch the Shading Question

Shading is not itself regulated under Shams Dubai, and it is worth saying that plainly rather than inventing a requirement. There is no mandated shading report, no prescribed method and no approved tool list for shading analysis. Three parts of the DEWA framework still change what you do.

Sizing is capped against consumption. Shams Dubai banks surplus generation as credit rather than paying cash, and systems are sized so annual generation does not exceed annual site consumption. That means an over-optimistic shading number has an asymmetric cost. It overstates savings, and it can also push a system past the sizing logic that justified it.

Equipment must be on the approved list. The usual mitigation for near-object shading is module-level power electronics, either optimisers or microinverters, so the practical question is which of those are DEWA approved for the project. Choosing a mitigation the approval process will reject is a design error dressed as an engineering one.

Only an enrolled contractor submits. That keeps the design responsibility with a named party, which in turn is why a defensible, reproducible shading method is worth having even where nobody asks for one. The market context for all of this sits in our best solar software in UAE overview and the closing side is covered in best solar proposal software in the UAE.

Top 10 Solar Shading Analysis Tools in the UAE Compared

Prices below are quoted in each vendor’s own billing currency as published on 2 August 2026, because that is what you will actually be invoiced in. The US dollar converts at roughly AED 3.67 where a dirham figure is shown. Pricing moves. Confirm before you buy.

#	Tool	Published price	Shading method	Separates soiling?	Best for
1	SurgePV	$1,299 per user per year (about AED 4,770)	8,760-hour, module level, satellite 3D	Yes, cleaning interval input	UAE rooftop and C&I teams
2	PVsyst	CHF 700 per user per year, Professional	Hourly near and far shading scene	Yes, monthly soiling table	Finance packs and disputed numbers
3	HelioScope	Basic $1,620/yr, Pro $2,640/yr, 1 user	Hourly, component level	Partly, single soiling factor	Fast C&I rooftop iteration
4	Aurora Solar	Basic $135/user/mo annual ($1,620/yr), Premium $220 ($2,640/yr)	Hourly, 3D irradiance engine	Partly	Villa and residential depth
5	Solargis	Prospect Basic EUR 2,400/yr, Prospect Professional EUR 4,800/yr	Irradiance and soiling data, not a layout tool	Yes, site-specific soiling data	Getting the soiling number right
6	SolarEdge Designer	Free with account	Hourly, per-optimiser	No	Designing the mitigation itself
7	Scanifly	Not publicly listed, quote only	Drone photogrammetry site model	No	Measured plant-room heights
8	Solmetric SunEye 210	$2,195 base, North America	Fisheye sky-view field measurement	No	Settling an on-site argument
9	PVcase	Not publicly listed, quote only	Terrain aware, ground mount	Via linked simulation	Desert ground mount
10	RatedPower	Not publicly listed, quote only	Automated utility-scale layout	Via linked simulation	Developers above 20 MW

Two things in that table are worth saying plainly rather than glossing over. PVsyst at CHF 700 per user per year is cheaper than SurgePV, and a five-seat PVsyst team pays CHF 3,500 against $6,495 for five SurgePV seats. Aurora Basic at $1,620 a year also undercuts a single SurgePV Individual seat at $1,899. We rank SurgePV first on how it handles the shading and soiling split on a Gulf roof, not on price.

Read the fourth column first. Half this list cannot tell you whether the loss you are chasing is dust, and that is the column that should drive a UAE purchase.

1. SurgePV

Best for: UAE rooftop and C&I teams who need a defensible hourly shading number and a soiling assumption that reflects the actual cleaning contract.

SurgePV builds a 3D site model from a satellite address, lets you place rooftop plant with measured heights, and runs an 8,760-hour simulation at module level with string aggregation. Two properties matter for this market specifically. The soiling model takes a cleaning interval as an input rather than a fixed percentage, so a quarterly-cleaned Sharjah warehouse and a monthly-cleaned Dubai office produce genuinely different yields instead of both getting the 2 percent default. And the shading result is reported as its own hourly loss line rather than folded into a general derate, so the two losses can be read separately in the same report. The shadow analysis module is on every paid plan rather than being a top-tier add-on, which is why a five-seat team lands near AED 23,850 a year.

Named weaknesses, plainly. First, no Gulf lender or IPP tender committee names SurgePV in a document list, and several still name PVsyst, so any project touching finance keeps a PVsyst seat regardless. Second, there is no field instrument and no drone capture of its own, so rooftop plant heights come from your survey discipline rather than from measured photogrammetry: pair it with Scanifly or a SunEye reading when a height is contested. Third, its soiling model is an interval-driven estimate, not a site-measured one, so on a large or contractually sensitive site a Solargis soiling dataset is a better input than anything the platform generates internally.

2. PVsyst

Best for: the number that has to survive somebody else’s review.

PVsyst is the reference implementation, and in the Gulf its most useful feature for this page’s argument is the monthly soiling table. You can enter a real dust profile month by month, which means the summer shamal season and the milder winter months stop being averaged into a single misleading annual figure. Set alongside its near-shading scene editor and its explicit loss diagram, that gives you shading and soiling as two separately visible lines in the same document.

Weakness. Building a 3D near-shading scene of a cluttered Dubai plant deck in PVsyst is slow, it is a desktop tool licensed as an annual per-user subscription at CHF 700 for the Professional edition, and no volume C&I team can run it on every job. It is an engineering instrument, not a workflow. Our PVsyst alternative comparison covers where teams replace it, and our sister engineering team’s guide to reading a PVsyst loss diagram explains why the shading and soiling lines get read together.

3. HelioScope

Best for: a C&I designer iterating several Dubai or Abu Dhabi warehouse roofs a week.

HelioScope’s strength is that shading, string layout and inverter selection are modelled together, so you see the mismatch consequence of a chiller shadow rather than just the irradiance loss. On a 500 kW roof with a busy plant deck that is the fastest way to test three stringing options against the same obstruction set.

Weakness. Soiling is a single flat factor rather than an interval or a monthly profile, so the Gulf assumption is yours to override manually and it is easy to forget. Near-object 3D modelling is competent but coarser than a dedicated 3D tool for complex villa roofs. See our HelioScope alternative guide.

4. Aurora Solar

Best for: villa and high-end residential work where the customer-facing output matters as much as the engineering.

Aurora has the deepest residential workflow in the category and a genuinely good irradiance engine. Where it struggles in the UAE is that the LIDAR coverage underpinning its best automated features is patchy over Emirati addresses, so the headline capability degrades to manual tracing on many jobs while the price does not degrade with it.

Weakness. The LIDAR modelling and bankable shade reports that justify Aurora sit on Premium at $220 per user per month billed annually, not on Basic at $135, and plan sets are a separately priced service rather than a plan inclusion. Add patchy LIDAR coverage locally, and soiling handling that is not built for a market where soiling is the larger loss. Our Aurora Solar alternative comparison covers the migration question.

5. Solargis

Best for: getting the soiling number right instead of guessing it.

Solargis is not a layout tool and should not be judged as one. It is a satellite-derived irradiance and meteorological data provider, and it publishes site-specific soiling loss estimates alongside the irradiance time series. On a UAE project where the difference between an 8 percent and a 20 percent annual soiling assumption decides whether a performance guarantee is achievable, buying the data rather than accepting a default is cheap insurance. Solargis publishes plan pricing rather than a per-site price: Prospect Basic is EUR 2,400 a year for 500 projects and five users, Prospect Professional EUR 4,800, and Evaluate EUR 12,000. Anyone quoting you a fixed per-site Solargis fee is quoting a negotiated arrangement, not a published rate. Feed the time series into PVsyst or your primary platform and model shading there.

Weakness. No geometry, no layout, no near-object modelling, no proposal. It answers one question well and nothing else.

6. SolarEdge Designer

Best for: designing the mitigation once you know the shading is real.

Inverter-vendor tooling belongs on this list for one reason. When near-object shading on a cluttered roof is unavoidable, the answer is usually module-level power electronics, and the vendor’s own designer is the tool that shows you what the optimiser or microinverter architecture actually recovers. SolarEdge Designer is free with an account and models per-optimiser behaviour under partial shade, which a generic string model approximates rather than resolves. The same logic applies to the Enphase and Huawei design tools if that is the hardware you deploy.

Weakness. It models the vendor’s own hardware and nothing else, so it is a mitigation-sizing tool and never an independent shading assessment. Confirm the specific optimiser or microinverter is DEWA approved before you design around it.

7. Scanifly

Best for: measured heights for rooftop plant, rather than estimated ones.

Scanifly is drone photogrammetry. You fly the roof, it builds a point cloud and a mesh, and the chiller is that tall because there is a model that says so. On a Dubai roof where survey access is slow and plant heights are the largest error source in the whole analysis, that evidence is worth more than any extra decimal place in the simulation.

Weakness. It requires a site visit, a pilot and UAE drone permissions, which are a real regulatory step here rather than a formality. Its own simulation depth trails the dedicated engines, so most teams use it as a geometry source feeding a model elsewhere. Scanifly does not publish a price list, so budget from a quote rather than from a figure you found in a software directory. Our Scanifly pricing breakdown covers what the quote usually depends on.

8. Solmetric SunEye 210

Best for: ending an argument on the roof in ten minutes.

The SunEye 210 is a current product, not a legacy one. Solmetric has been a Fluke company since the acquisition announced in September 2023 and still sells the instrument new at $2,195 base for North America, including a lifetime PV Designer licence. As of 2 August 2026 it is out of stock on Solmetric’s own store with a stated 10 to 12 week lead time, so plan the purchase ahead of a project rather than expecting next-week delivery.

The SunEye is a handheld fisheye instrument that photographs the sky dome from a point on the array and computes solar access at that point. When a customer or a consultant disputes whether the plant room really shades the third row, a dated reading taken at that exact position settles it faster than any re-simulation.

Weakness. The current lead time is the practical obstacle, it measures a point rather than an array so a large roof needs several readings, and it tells you nothing about soiling or string mismatch.

9. PVcase

Best for: UAE ground mount, which is a minority of the work but not none of it.

PVcase works inside CAD, models terrain properly and optimises row placement against real grade. For a Western Region ground mount on undulating desert it is the right tool and nothing on this list replaces it. For a rooftop it is the wrong tool at the wrong price.

Weakness. Ground-mount focus, CAD dependency, and pricing that only makes sense above a certain project size.

10. RatedPower

Best for: developers testing plant configurations at tens of megawatts.

RatedPower automates utility-scale conceptual engineering including layout, civil works and cabling, and it will produce a shading-informed row geometry across several configurations in hours. For a developer bidding into large Emirati procurement it earns its cost. For anyone under about 20 MW it does not. The wider case for these tools is in our utility-scale solar design software guide.

Weakness. Enterprise pricing, no rooftop relevance, and the shading output is a byproduct of layout automation rather than the product.

Verdict. For a UAE rooftop and C&I team that wants one tool: SurgePV for the hourly module-level shading and the cleaning-interval soiling input. Add a PVsyst licence the moment project finance is involved. Buy a Solargis soiling dataset for any site carrying a performance guarantee, and put a SunEye or a drone flight against any obstruction height somebody is willing to argue about.

Mistakes UAE Designers Make on Shading

1. 1
   Calling a soiling loss a shading loss. The most expensive mistake on this list, because it sends an engineer to re-string an array that needed a cleaning contract.
2. 2
   Accepting the 2 percent soiling default. It is a temperate-Europe figure. Gulf arrays run 8 to 25 percent annually depending entirely on the cleaning interval.
3. 3
   Importing a European row-spacing rule. At 1.14x shadow ratio a Dubai roof can carry a far higher ground coverage ratio than a German one, and copying the German rule quietly throws away roof area.
4. 4
   Estimating plant-room heights from satellite imagery. Overhead tiles give footprints, not heights, and a metre of error on a close object changes the first two rows completely.
5. 5
   Modelling only solar noon. The first and last hours of a December day are when parapets and adjacent towers do their damage, and a noon check misses all of it.
6. 6
   Applying a flat derate for shade. Bypass diode behaviour and string mismatch make the real loss non-linear and usually well above the shaded area fraction.

The shading loss and soiling loss glossary entries cover the mechanisms in the first, second and sixth points, and the performance ratio entry explains how a mislabelled loss propagates into the metric your client actually watches on their monitoring portal.

Building a UAE Shading Report Somebody Else Can Check

Here is the sequence we use when the output has to survive review rather than just inform a layout.

1. Measure the plant, do not estimate it. Heights for every object within five metres of a proposed row, from a drone flight, a laser measure or a field instrument, with the date recorded.
2. Model hourly at module level. 8,760 points, module resolution, string aggregation, with the software version and weather file stated.
3. Enter soiling as a cleaning interval, and name the interval. Monthly cleaning typically holds Gulf soiling to 3 to 6 percent, quarterly drifts to 10 to 15 percent, annual can pass 20 percent. Put the assumed interval in the report so the client knows what they are buying into.
4. Report the two losses separately. A shading line and a soiling line, never one combined figure. This single habit prevents most of the misdiagnosis this page is about.
5. Test the mitigation. If near-object shading is unavoidable, model the optimiser or microinverter case explicitly rather than assuming module-level electronics remove the loss. They reduce it, they do not delete it.
6. Re-run when the roof changes. A new AHU or a leased telecom mast makes the original study wrong, and on a long guarantee that will happen at least once.

Step three is the one most Gulf teams skip and it is the one that decides whether the annual number is honest. Regional resource and capacity context here is tracked by the IEA and IRENA, both of which publish the Gulf deployment figures this guidance is calibrated against.

How Heaven Green Energy Helps

We build and operate solar plant, which means 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.
• Commercial solar for rooftop C&I where plant-deck geometry decides the layout.
• Industrial solar for large-roof and ground-mount work.
• Solar calculator for a fast first-pass sizing before any modelling starts.
• Heaven Designs 3D pre-design when you need a modelled roof and obstruction set produced by an engineering team rather than another software seat.
• QBits on string versus microinverter for the mitigation decision once shading is confirmed.

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

Shading Analysis in Nearby Markets

The UAE, Saudi Arabia and India all share the correction that matters most in dusty markets, which is telling soiling loss apart from shading loss.

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

Frequently Asked Questions

Is most UAE solar underperformance shading or soiling?

On rooftop arrays in the UAE, soiling is the larger loss far more often than shading. Uncleaned Gulf arrays lose in the region of 1 percent per week during the dry season, which compounds to 8 to 25 percent annually depending on the cleaning interval, while a well-laid-out rooftop array typically carries a shading loss in the low single digits. Both get reported as underperformance, which is why teams that only have one combined loss figure keep diagnosing the wrong one.

How do I tell shading and soiling apart on a live array?

Two checks. First, look for spatial and time-of-day structure: shading hits the same strings at the same clock hours every day and drifts slowly with the season, while soiling pulls the whole array down evenly across all daylight hours. Second, watch what happens after a wash or a rain event: soiling recovers almost all of the gap in one step and shading does not move at all. String-level monitoring data at fifteen minute resolution is enough to run both checks.

What soiling loss should I model for a UAE project?

Model the cleaning interval rather than a percentage. Monthly cleaning typically holds annual soiling loss to 3 to 6 percent in the Gulf, quarterly cleaning drifts to 10 to 15 percent, and annual or ad-hoc cleaning can pass 20 percent, with shamal dust events making it worse. The 2 percent default shipped by most global platforms is a temperate-Europe number and will overstate UAE yield materially over the asset life. On a site carrying a performance guarantee, buy a site-specific soiling estimate from a data provider such as Solargis.

What is the December solar noon elevation in Dubai?

About 41.3 degrees, from 90 minus the 25.2N latitude minus the 23.44 degree solstice declination. Shadow length at that hour is the obstruction height divided by the tangent of the elevation, so a 1 metre object casts about 1.14 metres of shadow. Abu Dhabi at 24.4N gives about 42.2 degrees and 1.10 metres, and Ras Al Khaimah at 25.8N gives about 40.8 degrees and 1.16 metres.

Does inter-row spacing matter much in the UAE?

Much less than in Europe. A flat-roof array at 10 degrees tilt with 2.1 metre modules in portrait needs roughly 0.41 metres of clear row spacing to be shadow-free at Dubai December solar noon, against roughly 1.45 metres for the same array in Berlin. That means an Emirati roof supports a considerably higher ground coverage ratio, and importing a European spacing rule wastes usable roof area. The binding constraint here is near-object shading from rooftop plant, not row geometry.

Does DEWA require a shading report for Shams Dubai?

No. Shams Dubai does not mandate a shading study, prescribe a method or publish an approved tool list for shading analysis, and it is worth saying that plainly rather than inventing a requirement. Where DEWA rules do touch the question is that systems are sized against annual site consumption with surplus banked as credit, that only a DEWA-enrolled contractor may submit, and that any optimiser or microinverter you specify as shading mitigation must be on the DEWA approved equipment list.

What shades a Dubai commercial rooftop most?

Rooftop plant, in this order in our experience: parapets on the northern and eastern edges, chiller and condenser banks, air handling units on plinths, duct and pipe racks, lift motor rooms and stair overruns, water tanks, and leased telecom masts. Adjacent towers are a separate category and in dense districts they can rule out a roof entirely. A neighbouring 80 metre tower directly south casts roughly 91 metres of shadow at December solar noon.

Do module-level optimisers remove a shading loss?

They reduce it, they do not remove it. Optimisers and microinverters break the string-level current mismatch that makes partial shading so disproportionately expensive, so the loss moves closer to the shaded area fraction instead of several times it. The blocked module still produces nothing while it is blocked. Model the specific architecture rather than applying a blanket recovery assumption, and confirm the device is DEWA approved before you design around it.

How much does shading analysis software cost in the UAE?

SurgePV is $1,299 per user per year on the 5-User Team plan, about AED 4,770, with shading included. PVsyst Professional is CHF 700 per user per year, which is cheaper than SurgePV. HelioScope is $1,620 a year on Basic and $2,640 on Pro for one user. Aurora is $135 per user per month billed annually on Basic ($1,620 a year) and $220 on Premium, with plan sets priced separately. Solargis starts at EUR 2,400 a year for Prospect Basic. SolarEdge Designer is free with an account. Field and capture tools are separate capital: Scanifly does not publish pricing, and a new Solmetric SunEye 210 is $2,195 base in North America, currently on a stated 10 to 12 week lead time.