Acquisition feeds into the inverter and smart energy company’s overall ‘masterplan’ to involve itself in the full gamut of distributed and clean energy market segments.
Kokam has been awarded contracts to deliver 40MWh of battery energy storage at solar power plants in South Korea, including its newest High Energy Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt Oxide (HE NMC) batteries.
SolarEdge is targeting a world where the “majority of solar systems will include storage”, according to CEO Guy Sella, as the company announced record revenues and shipments in the third quarter of 2018.
An agreement to buy 75% of Korean battery manufacturer Kokam gives SolarEdge a level of vertical integration that could make the PV company a ‘one-stop-shop’ for customers, while SolarEdge could diversify into areas outside solar energy.
Home storage systems have been considered an ‘early adopter’ market in many parts of the world, perhaps more important as a way that individuals can control their own green energy use and save energy than as a means of generating big money returns.
Israel-headquartered SolarEdge launched a software platform for aggregating household energy storage units – and other distributed energy equipment – into virtual power plants, last week. The company’s solution has already been chosen for a VPP project in Australia by AGL, one of the country’s biggest utilities. The commercial launch of the VPP platform direct to customers is now underway. Andy Colthorpe spoke with Lior Handelsman, one of SolarEdge’s founders and vice president of marketing and product strategy.
Virtual power plants (VPPs) can greatly increase the value of home energy storage systems for a range of stakeholders including grid operators, utilities and their customers, according to SolarEdge, which has just launched a VPP software platform.
Residential energy storage in Germany for PV self-consumption could be handed a boost in 2020, as some of the earliest premium feed-in tariffs (FiTs) begin to expire.
