Enphase Energy is a US-headquartered energy technology company that designs and manufactures software-driven home energy solutions spanning solar generation, home energy storage and web-based monitoring and control. Enphase recently opened its India engineering and business operations centre. We have David Ranhoff, COO, Enphase Energy, in this exclusive exchange with T&D India, telling us more about his company and how Enphase is looking forward to electrifying India “one micro at a time.”
Can we start by understanding the services offered by Enphase in the global solar market?
Enphase Energy, Inc., is a world-wide provider of energy management solutions. The Company is engaged in designing, developing, manufacturing and selling microinverter systems for the solar photovoltaic (PV) industry. The Company offers microinverter systems to the residential and commercial markets in the United States, Canada, Latin America, the United Kingdom, France, the Benelux region, certain other European markets, Australia, and New Zealand.
The Enphase microinverter system consists of three components: Enphase microinverters, an Envoy gateway and Enlighten cloud-based software. The microinverters provide power conversion at the individual solar module. The Envoy bi-directional communications gateway serves as a hub providing collecting and sending data to Enlighten software, which provides the capabilities to remotely monitor, manage, and maintain an individual system or a fleet of systems.
We understand that Enphase has opened an engineering and operations centre at Bengaluru. Please orient us with its scope of activities.
Enphase’s India Engineering and Business Operations Center plays an important part for Enphase’s overall global strategy. It will be a Center of Excellence for software, hardware, supply chain, strategic sourcing, product management, and customer service. These groups will meet the needs of Enphase’s customers both locally and worldwide.
Enphase’s energy management system consists of complex software and hardware including our own ASIC. As the Silicon Valley of India, Bengaluru was the obvious choice for our location
There is no better way to grow in a 40 GW (by 2022) rooftop market like India than to set up a significant Engineering and Business Operations Center as we are doing in Bangalore.
Tell us about the microinverter technology of Enphase and discuss why Enphase microinverters will be advantageous to Indian customers.
Enphase Microinverters offer the most advanced inverter technology on the market, which means higher production, greater reliability and unmatched intelligence.
Enphase Microinverters are designed and proven to operate for decades in harsh climates such as India’s. The microinverter generates less heat and processes only about 10% of power that string inverters do. This makes the product highly resilient to heat.
Enphase Microinverters minimise losses caused by panel mismatch, degradation, cabling, and external factors like soiling. In full sun or shade, you harvest more energy with Enphase Microinverters.
During qualification, these products go through more than a million hours of testing.
In low-light conditions, Enphase’s Burst Mode allows panels to come on earlier in the morning and turn off later in the day, which allows the system to maintain highly efficient operations during low-light conditions where other solar systems would stop generating power. In a country like India where the air pollution impacts solar production (up to 25% in cities), this feature provides significant advantage. In short, Enphase is made for India.
Currently, where would you be sourcing microinverters from? Do you envisage setting up manufacturing facilities in India in the medium term?
Enphase develops and owns the entire manufacturing process, then collaborates with our partner Flextronics in China to execute that process to produce our products in high volumes.
As part of our global business expansion strategy, we are looking at expanding our manufacturing capacity and will evaluate future locations in due course.
What type of clientele will Enphase be focusing on in India?
India is one of the fastest growing solar markets in the world with 40GWs of rooftop market potential. Based on the suitability of our microinverter systems, we will be looking to grow in the residential, commercial and industrial segments.
India has aspired to have 40 GW of solar rooftop capacity by 2022. How do you see the opportunities in store?
India is a huge country with varying levels of electricity access. Our mission is “to deliver technology solutions that make clean energy affordable, reliable and accessible to all’ and that’s what we intend to do. As our product portfolio develops, we will aim to add value in the electricity access market.
What are the major challenges that you foresee in India’s 40 GW solar rooftop target?
It takes 3-5 months to get the approval for a grid-connected rooftop system. It is a very complex and time-consuming process and projects take much longer than expected to come online. Additionally, the Indian market needs to transition to view quality as the benchmark, not price. Particularly in remote areas quality equipment will mean less or in fact no downtime of systems and therefore electricity generation. This is crucial to ensuring constant supply to all those who need it.
Enphase is positioned perfectly to meet this need. Not least because of our unique value proposition and no single point of failure in the entire system, but also because our focus is on tirelessly delivering the highest quality products. This makes Enphase an easy and obvious choice for financiers, project developers and system owners.
