Dive Brief:
- Dynapower, a manufacturer of energy storage inverters, ended 2015 with a 75-MW backlog, according to Energy Storage Report.
- The Burlington, Vermont-based company expects to sell 30 MW to 35 MW of inverters outside the United States in 2016 and as much as double that amount in the U.S. market.
- Dynapower anticipates a boost in the inverter market later this year with the introduction of silicon carbide semiconductor technology.
Dive Insight:
Riding on the strength in the energy storage market, Dynapower anticipates another year of 100% growth for its inverters.
The Burlington, Vt.-based company ended 2015 with a 75-MW backlog of inverter orders, the result of "unprecedented demand across different markets," according to Adam Knudsen, Dynapower's president. The U.S. energy storage market has swiftly grown in capacity, with GTM research estimating that energy storage installations will reach 192 MW in 2015, triple the amount of storage installed in 2014.
Dynapower serves the industrial and utility-scale markets, with products of 100kW and up.
In July the company signed a deal to supply 250 kW inverters for Tesla's Powerpack commercial battery system for large commercial and utility customers. The system is capable of 2-hour, 3-hour or 4-hour continuous net discharge power using grid-tied bi-directional inverters.
Most of the company’s sales, however, came from behind-the-meter installations and up to 85% of those sales were in California. Front-of-meter deployments, meanwhile, were in the PJM Interconnection region.
Dynapower also expects an uptick in sales in the last quarter of 2016 as a result of the introduction of silicon carbide semiconductor technology, which provides faster switching that could help boost inverter efficiency by around 50% over current insulated-gate bipolar transistor technology.
The company expects the new technology to result in an improvement in the order of 1% in the overall inverter efficiency, which would be significant enough to improve system-wide return on investment for energy storage facilities.
Dynapower has a silicon-carbide patent pending and hopes to be one of the first vendors to market with the technology.