Solar PV microinverter company Enphase Energy lands $22.5 million in new financing

The funding round, which was led by Madrone Capital Partners, also

includes new investor Bay Partners as well as existing investors Third

Point Ventures, RockPort Capital Partners, and Applied Ventures. Jamie

McJunkin, general partner of Madrone, will join the Enphase board.

“We

are experiencing exceptional demand for our microinverter systems,”

said Paul Nahi, Enphase CEO. “This financing will be used to ramp up

manufacturing, accelerate new product development, and expand into new

geographic markets.”

“The Enphase Energy team has demonstrated extraordinary innovation

and execution, and we’re excited to be an investor in a company that is

poised to extend its leadership in solar inverters,” said Madrone’s

McJunkin. “This capital will give Enphase the resources necessary to

further accelerate its growth.”

Enphase says it has already sold tens of thousands of

microinverters–which convert the DC output of each solar module into

AC power and can be monitored at the module level–into hundreds of

residential and commercial installations. Since demand for the devices

has been high, the Petaluma, CA-based company has signed sales and

distribution agreements with major partners and distributors.

At Greentech Media’s recent solar industry summit, Enphase’s VP of

marketing, Raghu Belur, said that the company has gone into volume

production with the microinverters, and that the devices have already

passed the 15 million unit-hours mark in the field.

Belur also detailed improvements in the second-generation

microinverter, which has a 96% efficiency rating, an operating

temperature of -40°C to 65°C, better than 99.8% system availability,

mean time between failures rated at >300 years, and a smaller

footprint than the first-generation device.

He also showed data comparing the microinverter energy harvesting

performance against a traditional inverter, with the module-level

device providing an average kilowatt-hour energy improvement of 10.7%.

The company claims a system-level internal rate of return gain of

24.5% when the microinverters are deployed, factoring in metrics such

as system uptime, performance, and balance of systems/labor costs.