Solar Studies

Quantifying buildings’ interaction with sunlight to improve efficiency and comfort, prevent dangerous glare, measure shadow, and leverage clean onsite generation

Shadows cast onto park by tall buildings

By learning in detail how your project responds to sunlight, you can 

  • Improve operating efficiency and occupant comfort
  • Avoid (or mitigate) dangerous or adverse conditions such as glare and shadow 
  • Optimize your strategies for solar power generation. 

Our service

We provide engineers, architects and designers with the information they need to fully understand how their buildings or developments interact with the sun. We can tell you, for example,

  • How much solar energy is available to your project (even for complex buildings or large areas)
  • The quantity and quality of daylight inside your building (see also our services focused on daylighting) 
  • Where your building’s shadow falls and how it moves (even moment to moment)
  • Whether there is glare from a proposed or existing building, whether the glare is dangerous, and what to do about it

We have developed a suite of proprietary tools that allow us to quickly provide detailed, customized results to help guide design decisions. These tools have been benchmarked and show good agreement against more time-consuming research-grade rendering software and real-world measurements.

But beyond giving you numbers, we help you understand how to use them to improve your project. We provide a holistic analysis, drawing on the whole range of RWDI’s expertise to provide a comprehensive, appropriate solution. For example, if adding a canopy to prevent glare will cause a problem with snow buildup, we’ll catch it and adjust our recommendation.