Dive Brief:

• As demand for storage and solar energy inverters grow, an Austrian company is ramping up its production and is expanding its footprint in the United States, Bloomberg reports. 
• Fronius International GmbH has constructed almost 8 GW of equipment focused on solar energy and storage, reports Bloomberg, which recently featured the privately-held company. The company is a supplier for Tesla Motors. 
• Its facility in Austria has 1,100 workers capable of producing 500 inverters in an hour. Last year the company more than doubled production.

Dive Insight:

Bloomberg Technology has highlighted a fast-growing Austrian company whose products are winding up in energy solutions used by Tesla and other grid-edge companies. 

“We are in a very, very extreme growth business,’’ Martin Hackl, head of Fronius’ solar energy division, told the news outlet. “The old hierarchy was a few power plants but we’re reinventing that — we’re making a distributed production and storage market.’’

Through its U.S. subsidiary, the company supplies inverters and data communication solutions for grid-connected photovoltaic systems. The company is also a leader in the precision-welding arena.

“For a small company, it has a relatively large number of tailored inverter products focused on state–of–the–art applications, and is easily in the top 10 global inverter makers by production volume,” Jenny Chase, a solar analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance told Bloomberg Technology. 

Revenues from the solar division almost doubled last year, making up roughly 40% of Fronius' overall sales. The company more than doubled production last year, reaching 1.35 GW of products.

“We see the inverter as the point of intelligence,” said Hackl. “We’re working to make them more intelligent, more communicative, to work in swarms of houses off photovoltaic and battery systems.”