Solar Spotlight: Bridging the gap from residential to commercial solar with Sungrow

In this episode of Solar Spotlight, Madeline Acri, Applications Engineer at Sungrow, discusses the company’s history in the United States, the inverters Sungrow offers here and how Sungrow is helping residential solar contractors expand into larger markets.

A written portion of this podcast is below but be sure to listen to the full episode on your preferred podcast service.

Contractor’s Corner by Solar Power World · Solar Spotlight: Bridging the gap from residential to commercial solar with Sungrow

SPW: What is Sungrow’s mission and company history?

Acri: Sungrow was founded in 1997, and we released our first PV string inverter in 2003, this means we have been committed to constant improvement with an emphasis on the PV string inverter market for 21 years. We became the first inverter company to install 100-GW of solar PV worldwide in 2019. Globally, we’re committed to creating a greener world, because all of Sungrow’s business units are dedicated to renewable technologies. We have 13,000 employees that are all in a renewable business unit. Those include wind, solar, energy storage systems, green hydrogen and EV charging. We presently have 330 GW of online inverter production capacity and 35 GW-hours of online ESS production capacity.

What is Sungrow’s product history in North America?

After launching our first inverter in 2003, we grew to become the global leader of inverter shipments by 2015, around the time that Sungrow entered the U.S. market. The first product that Sungrow launched in the United States was the SG125 string inverter, in 2013. Three years later, in 2016, Sungrow launched the SG2500U, the first outdoor-rated central inverter on the market. If you look at our brand in general, as it’s grown throughout the North American market, we’ve been very prominent in the utility market space.

Now that we’re transitioning our emphasis as a company in the North American market from utility scale into commercial and industrial markets, we’re really working on expanding our brand and our name recognition. Our goal now, with me on the string inverter team, is to really engage with customers and increase our name recognition within the C&I space today.

How do installers benefit by installing Sungrow products?

Sungrow was ranked 100% bankable for four consecutive years in 2022 by the BNEF. And bankability demonstrates that banks are more likely to provide loans or issue loans for solar projects using Sungrow inverters. And what’s another element of Sungrow and why this is good for installers, is that we are deeply dedicated to research and development, and that helps enhance our technological improvement process. So, 40% of our staff is dedicated solely to R&D, which, if you think about it, that there are 13,000 of us, 40% that are just working on the products is truly remarkable. Because we care so much about engineering and quality, we’re able to scale and grow our market share in a significant way. Even though Sungrow is a large company, we still deeply care about the customer, and we deeply care about the customer’s experience, so our design team takes customer feedback and incorporates it into future design iterations for our inverter products.

What would you recommend for installers in the residential space trying to break into the commercial and industrial markets?

There are a lot of installers in the residential space because they have a large volume of projects, a large volume of households. The market can sometimes be tumultuous. We’re riding the solar coaster, as they say. There has been a little bit of a transition from resi-only installers to installers working in both the residential market and the commercial market.

The expansion of this resi/commercial type of installer is a really interesting one, because you’re able to have the best of both worlds. Commercial projects can often have a slightly slower sales cycle, definitely different design elements and design considerations. But as installers transition from residential to commercial, Sungrow strives to be a good partner to them. Because our string inverters are simple to design lightweight, and easy to wire they are the perfect product to consider when you’re going into, let’s say a 480-V rooftop for a school, perhaps, or any projects that are around 50 – 150 kW.

This podcast is sponsored by Sungrow