In This Article:
A handful of small companies play a critical role in the solar-energy industry. Two experts explain why they think two of these companies are the most exciting investments in the solar industry right now.
A full transcript follows the video.
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This video was recorded on Dec. 20, 2018.
Nick Sciple: Let's go into the solar component accessory manufacturers. This is something that gets me the most excited. These are the folks that make inverters, as you mentioned off the top of the show, they make some panel mounting racks, but the really exciting stuff in addition to the inverters is what's going on with the energy storage systems. If solar is going to be a larger and larger segment of our energy production over the long-term, we're going to have to find a way to store some of that energy produced during the day when the sun is out for use at night.
What are we seeing with these component manufacturers? What's really driving the story for these companies right now?
Jason Hall: The big needle-moving thing right now is definitely the shift to module-level power electronics. MLPE is the acronym that you'll hear. Historically, the way a solar system has worked is, you get the panels on the roof, then you have an inverter in your garage that converts DC from the panels to AC from all of them and sends it to the grid or sends it into your house for you to consume. The problem with that is, it's a single point of failure. If the inverter goes out, you are no longer getting any solar at all. Those panels are just sitting up there on your roof soaking up heat.
There's been a move to shift to actually having inverters and power optimizers on each individual panel. A couple of things that this going to do is, it's going to, No. 1, if you have an inverter go out, it only affects the panel that it's attached to. You're still getting power production from the rest of your system. Also, since it's taking the power from each panel, it's more effective at managing. You have power optimizers and also inverters on there, and they're managing the power. For example, if you have a tree that shades part of your solar system for part of the day, then it moves across, you get more efficient production because it's managing the power at the panel level. It's a much more efficient way to do it, in terms of getting power output. That could mean you need less panels to generate the same amount of power. It's a more efficient way to do it.