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by isoprophlex 523 days ago
I built a similar shadow mapping tool for some commercial party that wanted to accurately estimate solar panel production in The Netherlands... In my specific case I could access very accurate LIDAR heightmaps gathered from planes.

This means you can ray-march the location of the sun throughout the year over the entire country to calculate exactly where and when a surface is occluded by shadows from nearby (or even faraway, sometimes) objects.

The LIDAR data can be as detailed as a shadow cast by antennas, a chimney or a tree... Which is more important than you'd think, because a little bit of shadow on a single panel means that all panels daisy-chained to that panel will see an efficiency drop! (So you either don't chain them but give each panel its own inverter, or you wreck your neighbors chimney)