The global solar inverter market is predicted to reach $8.5 billion by 2014 – representing the sale of more than 7 million inverters that year; up from less than 1 million units in 2009.
A solar inverter sits between a solar panel array and a building’s electrical switchboard. It converts the DC current produced by the solar power system into 240 volt AC supply, suitable for use in general applications.
A new report from IMS Research forecasts an compound annual growth rate of nearly 25% for solar inverters. Last year, the research company says revenues from PV inverters more than doubled and bypassed $5 billion for the first time.
A bottleneck in component supply and huge demand early last year caused a serious shortage of inverters, but IMS Research says that is no longer the case and in fact, the market now faces a major oversupply. IMS says by the end of 2010, an estimated 2 GW of inverters were produced that were not needed.
During the shortage, leading inverter manufacturers such as SMA lost market share due to an inability to supply, providing opportunities for newer companies like Power One (Aurora inverters) to gain a foothold.
In 2010, many solar inverter suppliers built on their production capacity substantially and by the end of the year, total industry capacity was more than 30 GW; double the capacity of the year before. A further 12-15 GW of additional capacity is planned to be added in 2011.
Learn more about solar inverters.
