Hey guys,

New member and first post. I am a solar design engineer and I use sketchup to model pv arrays. Recently I installed skelion and I am still riding the free trial while it lasts. I have a question on the shadow derate generated by the plugin.

Basically, from what I gathered, the shadow derate calculates the percentage of sunlight hitting a string over the course of a month. So, cumulatively, a 65% derate means the entire string as a whole is receiving 65 % of the sunlight during that time period. Although a good start, this is too optimistic of a number.

PVsyst uses the most conservative shadow analysis which I personally like. In PVsyst, whenever any part of a string is shaded, it considers this string as a non current producing string. It doesn't matter if only part of one module is shaded, PVsyst considers the whole string as down.

My question is whether there is any way to do the same thing in Sketchup, with or without skelion. Any time any part of my string is shaded, I want the shadow derate to be 0% or completely shaded. For now, I am looking at the projected shadows over a string and if the shadow is covering the entire width of a module, then all by-pass diodes for that module are down and it effectively blocks production from the entire string. This basically renders the derate percentage useless because I have to manually look at the shadows on every string anyways.

Thoughts?

Thanks in advance,
Alex
SolarFlair Energy