Is a tree is shading my solar panels an emergency?
Not urgent. A money problem with a horticultural cause, and nothing about it is a safety question. How much money depends on your inverter architecture: with a single string inverter, shading a few cells can drag the whole string's output down disproportionately, while with microinverters or optimizers the loss is roughly confined to the shaded modules. The same shadow therefore costs very different amounts on two different roofs, and that figure is what the pruning decision should be built on.
What changes while you wait
Watch. No danger, no deadline — the cost of waiting is measured in kilowatt-hours and you can quantify it exactly from your own monitoring data before spending a dollar. What changes while you wait is that the shadow lengthens annually, so the pruning needed to clear it gets larger and the job gets more expensive and harder on the tree the longer you defer. If the tree belongs to a neighbor, the common-law starting point elsewhere is that you may trim only what overhangs your own property, at your own expense, and that no one owes you light across a property line — Indiana's specific position on solar access and on boundary trees is UNVERIFIED here; confirm with a local attorney before cutting anything on a line.
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