In this paper, an automated tool for the evaluation of I-V characteristics and energy yield of photovoltaic (PV) plants is proposed. The tool translates an AutoCAD drawing of the plant and surrounding obstacles into an in-house Matlab code that automatically generates an equivalent circuit representing the system, which is in turn solved by PSPICE. The plant is described at a high-granularity single-cell level, so that also the non-intuitive influence of small-area shadows can be accurately predicted. Nevertheless, the robust PSPICE engine ensures short simulation times. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.