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Smarter solar power could revolutionize industry
Inverter by Petaluma's Enphase Energy
By KEVIN MCCALLUM
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
A Petaluma solar startup emerged from stealth mode Tuesday, announcing plans to roll out technology that makes solar panels significantly more efficient and easier to manage.
Enphase Energy, a 2-year-old company founded by Sonoma County telecom veterans, claims to have created a solar energy management system that could revolutionize the way electricity is gathered from solar panels.
Its technology is based on micro-inverters, devices that convert the direct current generated by solar panels to the alternating current needed for use in homes and businesses.
"We are fundamentally shifting the way inverters will be developed and the way solar energy will be developed going forward," said Paul Nahi, the company's chief executive officer.
Instead of the single large inverter used on most solar installations, Enphase believes a network of smaller inverters attached to each solar panel can increase efficiency, ease installation and improve management of solar arrays.
The system is currently being tested and is expected to hit the market by summer. Cost and other details of the micro-inverters, which are about the size of a brick, have yet to be released.
The company was founded in March 2006 by Martin Fornage, an engineer with Advanced Fibre Communications before its 2004 purchase by Tellabs, and Raghu Belur, an engineer at Cerent before its 1999 purchase by Cisco Systems.
Enphase, which has 24 employees in Petaluma, is backed by $6.5 million in venture capital. The majority of the money was raised in early 2007, led by Third Point Ventures, an arm of New York-based Hedge Fund Third Point LLC. Don Green, who founded Advanced Fibre and is considered the father of Sonoma County's Telecom Valley, is an early investor.
Fornage got the idea for the company when he was having a solar array installed at his property near Lake Sonoma and he saw how inefficient it was, Belur said.
He called Belur and said, "You know, there's a problem here that needs to be solved," Belur recalled.
The problem was that traditional inverter systems have trouble maximizing the output of solar arrays because they can't discriminate between the different panels, Nahi said.
"Instead of 50 panels, it kind of sees one big panel," Nahi said.
In a traditional system with multiple solar panels, if one panel is not performing well -- because of dirt or shade, for example -- the performance of the entire system drops to the level of the weakest link in the chain, Nahi said.
The company likens the problem to the slowest car in a line holding up traffic.
But Enphase's system improves the output of the entire system by converting the energy from each panel, improving the entire array's performance, he said.
And because the micro-inverters are networked together with sensors and monitoring software, Enphase can quickly and remotely identify problems and alert the homeowner or business, Nahi said.
While the system is still in testing mode, the company felt it was ready to go public with its plans in part because it received a key testing certification two weeks ago, Nahi said.
The promise of micro-inverters is well known within the solar industry, said Dan Kammen, a professor in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley and a vice president of Enphase.
"I actually think this is, in some sense, the most important technological breakthrough solar has ever seen," he said.
Tests have shown efficiency improvements of 20 percent to 30 percent over traditional systems, Kammen said.
And because the technology works with any solar panel, it has the potential for wide adoption, he said.
Dan Thompson, president of SPG Solar in San Rafael, said he's heard the theory behind micro-inverters, but isn't sure whether the promised efficiency will be worth the additional cost.
On small residential systems with partial shade, for example, they may make perfect sense, but the benefit isn't as clear to him on large installations, Thompson said.
"If I'm installing 5,700 panels, personally I don't want 5,700 inverters," Thompson said.
But Nahi said interest in the product has been high from all sectors.
"We're getting as much interest from very, very large and commercial installers as we have from small residential installers," he said.
In the fast-growing solar industry, most of the venture capital to date has flowed into developing newer and better photovoltaic cells, while the inverter has largely been overlooked, Nahi said.
"There are all kinds of new panels coming out . . . and it's thrilling to watch," he said. "But very little investment has been made in the inverter space."
The company has enough money to launch the system but expects to need additional capital for a large-scale rollout, Nahi said.
You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com.
"I actually think this is, in some sense, the most important technological breakthrough solar has
ever seen."
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