Solar module-level power electronics maker SolarEdge has been quietly putting its own solar-battery inverter control system, dubbed StorEdge, into the field over the past couple years. But energy storage still makes up only a tiny fraction of its growing share of business in the highly competitive global solar inverter industry.
On Tuesday, SolarEdge announced a big new partner in the solar-storage space that could change that equation.
PetersenDean Roofing & Solar, the largest privately held U.S. solar and roofing company, announced that it’s pairing the StorEdge systems with 9.8-kilowatt-hour LG Chem batteries to provide homeowners “an affordable path to solar ownership and energy storage.”
It’s not the first solar-storage partnership for PetersenDean — the company has worked with Sunverge and Sonnen in the past. CEO Jim Peterson has called solar-storage the “new backbone for the future of our nation’s electric power and renewable energy industries,” indicating the company’s interest in finding a cost-effective way to bring the combination’s full array of capabilities to market.
While Tuesday’s announcement didn’t reveal pricing, in an August 2017 review of the StorEdge-LG system, Greentech Media priced a typical system at $9,950 — $5,550 for the battery, $2,600 for the inverter, and the rest for the meters, transformers and communications systems. That’s a hefty premium over a simple rooftop solar system, and quite a bit more than the cost of a backup generator that could provide homeowners a similar level of security against grid blackouts.
But Petersen noted in Tuesday’s announcement that customers will “save substantially in the long term” by storing excess solar energy to draw upon later, whether to avoid “unnecessary fees and taxes,” or providing “flexibility in an ever-changing utility landscape.”
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