Seems like SolarEdge's lower price is hurting Enphase by stealing market share.
With features, reliability and performance very similar, it comes down to price.
Last time I checked up to average residential-style installation, 6-7kW, the price was comparable between the 2.drees wrote:Seems like SolarEdge's lower price is hurting Enphase by stealing market share.
With features, reliability and performance very similar, it comes down to price.
Well, it looks like the stock price slide is in fact price related, they had to cut the prices by 19% to stay competitive.drees wrote:So if it's not price, why is SolarEdge stealing market share from Enphase? How is it better than Enphase aside from price?
I don't think it is... The redundancy of have many micro inverters would appear to me to be an advantage in reliability... But of course, it'd be great to have an expert opinion....drees wrote:So if it's not price, why is SolarEdge stealing market share from Enphase? How is it better than Enphase aside from price?
One thing that will/is impacting this industry is the new 2014 NEC 690.12 Rapid Shutdown requirements that require DC circuits to go below 30 volts within 10 seconds when shut down. One way that this has been achieved for a long time is with microinverters and optimizers. This requirement might help bring the cost premium of micro inverters/optimizers down vs installing relays/etc. like Midnite Solar's Birdhouse system.JimSouCal wrote:I don't think it is... The redundancy of have many micro inverters would appear to me to be an advantage in reliability... But of course, it'd be great to have an expert opinion....drees wrote:So if it's not price, why is SolarEdge stealing market share from Enphase? How is it better than Enphase aside from price?
As far as reliability (reliability engineer here), it depends upon how you define success. If success is ALL of your panels producing, then microinverters don't give you redundancy; they give you multiple single point failures (1 per panel!) If success is ANY of your panels producing, then yeah that's redundancy. With an optimizer/string inverter combo, you have the highest number of potential failures, and so the worst case for reliability (depending upon the actual failure models of each of course).JimSouCal wrote:I don't think it is... The redundancy of have many micro inverters would appear to me to be an advantage in reliability... But of course, it'd be great to have an expert opinion....
I would have agreed with you a month ago, but it appears that may change within the next month or so, depending upon the type of life SolarEdge can achieve with their new technology. Still, a single central inverter means a single point of failure for the entire system.fooljoe wrote:And I think they'd appreciate that although you might have to replace a few microinverters over 30 years, you're pretty much guaranteed to have to replace a string inverter at least once over the same period.