After rising to a solar market leader in China, Huawei is bringing its networking and telecommunications know-how to the U.S. We spoke with Bates Marshall, vice president and general manager of Huawei North America’s Smart PV Plant Solution (and a solar veteran himself) to tell us more.
SPW: Tell me a little about Huawei’s roots in electronics and also success in solar outside of the country, so we can better understand the expertise it brings to the U.S. solar market.
Bates Marshall, vice president and general manager of Huawei North America’s Smart PV Plant Solution
Bates Marshall: Huawei is a global leading information and communications technology company headquartered in Shenzhen, China. The company is a leader in end-to-end solutions in telecom and enterprise networks, devices such as smartphones and tablets, cloud computing systems, and energy conversion equipment. In 2016 the company achieved $60B in global revenue. In the span of just a few short years, the company has achieved number one worldwide market share in the solar inverter market by pursuing a singular vision of supplying its FusionSolar string inverters at utility scale and for distributed generation (DG) applications. This singular vision has allowed Huawei to reach massive scale within its inverter business resulting in reliability and supply chain advantages. In 2016 Huawei launched its FusionSolar string inverters into the U.S. market.
SPW: Why has Huawei chosen to focus strictly on string inverters for the solar market?
BM: Huawei believes that string inverters offer unique advantages for developers, EPCs, system owners and investors compared with legacy technologies. These include lower operations and maintenance (O&M) costs, greater energy production and lower capital expenses (CapEx). Since the global PV industry is under continuous pressure to drive out costs, Huawei believes that the cost-down roadmap of string inverters is superior to that of legacy central inverters. This is largely due to the fact that the main cost reduction drivers of string inverters are the costs of integrated circuits and advanced switching technologies–both of which have plenty of runway for cost reduction–while the main cost drivers of central inverters are commodity costs such as copper and steel. Finally, string inverters offer superior data collection and control resolution which enable advanced cloud-based O&M methodologies.
SPW: What makes Huawei a good choice for solar installers over other inverters on the market?
BM: Huawei offers our customers a very attractive combination of high technology and superior reliability that is proven worldwide with over 35 GW of installations. In addition, the company has built a world class customer facing organization in the U.S. to support our customers with expert application engineers, service engineers and account managers. In fact, we were proud to be recognized by one of our largest U.S. utility scale customers recently, not only for our technology but also specifically for the people that we have on our team–providing great feedback that we are succeeding at our mission to create sustainable value for our PV inverter customers in the U.S.