Solar Tracker Row Backtracking

Utility-scale solar plants pack thousands of single-axis trackers into tight rows to maximize land use, but that same density creates a problem: near sunrise and sunset, a row tilted to face the low sun casts a shadow straight onto its neighbor. This simulation models a real solar farm's north–south tracker rows, computing the true sun-tracking angle from solar geometry, the exact shaded fraction of each row from 2D shadow-ray projection, and the backtracking correction real tracker controllers apply to trade a small cosine misalignment for zero inter-row shading. Adjust the time of day, latitude and row spacing (ground coverage ratio) to see the trade-off play out, and toggle backtracking off to watch shading losses return.