Meg Cichon
Enphase (ENPH) has been slowly inching its way into the solar service business on both a residential and commercial scale, and may even tap utility-scale projects in the near future, according to Marty Rogers, Enphase’s vice president of worldwide customer service and support. Last year Enphase announced a partnership with solar crowdfunding platform Mosaic to offer O&M services to residential solar loan customers. More recently, it announced a commercial O&M offering that combines its C250 commercial microinverter technology with services that assist the design, installation and maintenance of solar projects, including cloud-based monitoring and a dedicated service team.
Next Phase Solar adds both residential and commercial projects to Enphase’s portfolio about 70 percent of those are commercial installations, and the remaining 30 percent residential with a small amount of utility-scale.
“This is a repeatable business and it will be interesting moving forward since the market is really based on both the increase and age of installations,” said Rogers. “We don’t see anyone else grabbing this market sector, so we decided it was a great move for us to go after it.”
With services that encompass project needs from start to finish, Enphase claims that its system will reduce financial uncertainty and capital costs while enhancing system performance and ultimately the return on investment (ROI). It’s sort of like commercial office space, explained Rogers. If an owner maintains office space with the highest levels of efficiency, the asset will stay strong and valuable. However, if the owner leaves the asset alone, it will decrease in value over time. “What we’re saying is: Let’s create asset value over a longer period of time, and include documentation to prove that it has been maintained this will prolong the life and value of the system.”
Enphase also revealed a new Energy Management System at the 2014 Solar Power International (SPI) conference, which is set to hit the market in the third quarter of 2015. The system combines its microinverters, storage and monitoring technology and aims to satisfy the growing commercial and residential storage-plus-solar market that is set to reach 318 MW by 2018.
“The energy storage business requires service, and it will be important to have the right teams in the right places to maintain systems,” said Rogers. “This will be huge for those trying to dive into residential storage, and I can’t think of one company that has a residential fleet for service but you have got to have this.”
Meg Cichon is an Associate Editor at RenewableEnergyWorld.com, where she coordinates and edits feature stories, contributed articles, news stories, opinion pieces and blogs. She also researches and writes content for RenewableEnergyWorld.com and REW magazine, and manages REW.com social media. Formerly, she was an Associate Editor of ideaLaunch in Boston, MA. She holds a BA in English from the University of Massachusetts and a certificate in Professional Communications: Writing from Emerson College.
This article was first published on RenewableEnergyWorld.com, and is republished with permission.
