Capabilities
Solar software features
Which software has the capability I need?
We normalise 139 capabilities across 100 products, because vendors describe the same thing in wildly different words — one capability in this dataset appears under nine separate names on nine separate sites.
Only 6 have their own page. A feature page needs at least 8 products carrying a value to be published and 12 to be worth indexing; below that it is a page about four products pretending to be a market survey. The rest of the 139 live on the product and comparison pages where they belong.
Verified against the vendor’s own pages.
Single-line diagram generation
Producing the one-line electrical drawing a permit office and an inspector read: array, strings, combiners, inverters, disconnects, conductors and the point of interconnection, on one sheet.
16 products offer it · 35 carry a value
Solar design & simulationBattery sizing and modelling
Sizing a battery against a site’s load profile and tariff, then simulating how it would actually behave across a year — state of charge, cycling, self-consumption and what the grid still supplies.
26 products offer it · 32 carry a value
Solar design & simulationShading analysis
Working out how much of the sun a given panel actually sees once trees, chimneys, parapets, neighbouring buildings and the horizon are accounted for — and what that costs in annual yield.
17 products offer it · 26 carry a value
Solar design & simulation3D roof and obstruction modelling
Building a three-dimensional model of the roof and everything on it — planes, pitches, azimuths, vents, chimneys, skylights — from imagery, LIDAR, drone capture or a manual trace.
12 products offer it · 14 carry a value
Permitting & engineeringPE-stamped plan sets
A professional engineer licensed in the project’s state reviewing the plan set and applying their seal, making the drawings submittable where the AHJ requires stamped engineering.
7 products offer it · 12 carry a value
AI & automationAI design assistance
A vendor’s explicit claim that machine learning or AI does part of the design work — detecting roof planes, placing modules, or proposing a layout — as opposed to a deterministic automation the vendor markets with the word “smart”.
8 products offer it · 10 carry a value not indexed
Why only 6 pages
A directory that generates one page per capability ends up with 139 near-identical pages, most of them listing three or four products. Search engines call
that scaled content and they are right to. So the count is set by the evidence:
5 of these clear the 12-product indexing floor and the
1 that don’t are published but carry a noindex directive, which the page itself says in the body rather than hiding in a meta tag.
One planned page was dropped entirely. /features/ai-roof-detection/ maps onto a
canonical capability that exactly one product carries a value for. A page built on a sample
of one is the failure mode the floors exist to catch, so it was never built — and this
paragraph is the record of that decision.
How the taxonomy works