On October 31, Aurora released our horizon shading feature, which will introduce automatic modeling of shading due to the surrounding terrain. This can be enabled for both irradiance maps and performance simulations in their respective settings menus, and default settings can be set in your account settings page.
Horizon shading accounts for terrain features at a distance such as surrounding hills and mountains, but does not automatically account for man-made structures or trees. Your remote site assessment should still include drawing in these objects where needed. When horizon shading is enabled in the performance simulation, a separate value for horizon shading will be present in the system loss diagram.
We have also included an update in the irradiance calculations to ensure that horizon shading correctly impacts the diffuse irradiance. Existing designs may see a slight increase in irradiance and production estimates if there are shading objects at low angles relative to the panel tilt.
10/31/2019- Horizon Shading Announcement
