Israel-headquartered solar inverter producer SolarEdge has signed a supply deal with US community and commercial solar developer Summit Ridge Energy for US-made inverters.
The inverters will be used for commercial solar installations across the US “estimated to exceed 100MW”, Summit Ridge said. Shipments will begin in April 2025 from SolarEdge’s manufacturing facility in Tampa, Florida.
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This is the second US-made inverter supply deal Summit Ridge has signed. In September it inked a deal with German technology conglomerate Siemens for 125MW of US-made inverters produced at a facility in Wisconsin. At the time of the Siemens deal, Summit Ridge claimed that it sourced “all key solar panel components – including modules, racking and inverters” from US suppliers, which positioned it to benefit from the domestic content tax adder under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
Following the most recent deal, SolarEdge said Summit Ridge “is expected to standardise its rooftop solar installations with SolarEdge inverter solutions for commercial solar.”
Summit Ridge VP of operations, Mike Dillon said: “This partnership with SolarEdge highlights our unwavering commitment to using American-made components in 100% of our solar energy projects.”
Inverter market shakeup
SolarEdge has had a turbulent few months. The company has announced four rounds of layoffs in the last year, most recently cutting 400 jobs to “enhance operating cost efficiency” as part of its ongoing restructuring efforts. This followed cuts in January, July and November of last year and the resignation of the company’s CEO, Zvi Lando.
The company announced the closure of its utility-scale battery storage division and plans to focus on solar and solar-tied batteries in the future.
Similar dynamics have been at play in other western inverter manufacturers. German inverter producer SMA Solar announced around 1,100 job cuts amid what it called a “persistently challenging” residential PV market and US-based microinverter producer Enphase announced layoffs and abandoned a manufacturing contract in Mexico.
In an interview with PV Tech Premium, Cormac Gilligan, associate director of clean energy technology at S&P Global, said that the inverter industry is experiencing big-picture “growing pains” as technology demands shift and the residential solar boom which followed the outbreak of war in Ukraine fades.
