The CORE studio at Thornton Tomasetti uses Grasshopper everyday to enhance workflows amongst many engineering disciplines. We draw a lot of help and inspiration from this community and hope that you will find some of the tools that we have created helpful, too.
Ed Wealend
Assuming you don't need to preserve the tree structure of the shades for later use, you can likely just use the 'clean tree' component (ensuring remove nulls/empty is set to true) before inputting your geometry to the relevant daylight and energy components.
May 8, 2018