Goldman Sachs, Cleanhill Partners acquire majority stake in US inverter maker EPC Power

From pv magazine USA

EPC Power Corp., a US-based supplier of smart inverters for utility-scale solar installations, today announced the Sustainable Investing business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Cleanhill Partners acquired a majority stake in its company. The transaction closely follows the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which among other provisions, extends a first-ever tax credit to stand-alone energy storage, creating a significant financial incentive for clean energy technologies.

EPC Power, headquartered in San Diego, Calif. is an end-to-end power conversion solution provider. Its main products are designed for utility-scale applications as well as business and facility applications, and its smart inverters are designed for applications in standalone energy storage, solar energy storage and data center backup power. Going beyond the role of traditional inverters to feed power into the grid, smart inverters are powered by advanced software and work dynamically with the grid to increase resilience, reliability, safety, and security.

“EPC Power is uniquely positioned to play a critical role in the evolution of the U.S. solar and energy storage value chains and is now well capitalized to continue its trajectory of rapid growth,” said Alexander Mass, managing director of Goldman Sachs Asset Management. “As the only scaled supplier of smart inverters that are designed, engineered and 100% manufactured in the U.S., EPC Power is a natural continuation of our thematic investment activity in this space, in partnership with Cleanhill Partners and EPC management.”

To date, EPC Power has sold more than 2 GW of smart inverters globally. Its first manufacturing facilities are in Poway in San Diego County, Calif., with a second U.S. manufacturing location on the East Coast scheduled to open in late 2022 to significantly expand production capacity. With a growing customer base in Europe, EPC Power also maintains an engineering and sales office in Helsinki, Finland. The company employs approximately 180 people.

“In an exploding market of cleantech innovators, EPC Power stands out for its industry-leading technology, which directly supports the renewable energy transition while preserving grid reliability and performance,” said Rakesh Wilson and Ash Upadhyaya, managing partners at Cleanhill Partners, which first invested in EPC Power in 2021 when it underwrote a credit facility to support its growth; since then, the firm has also provided counsel on operational matters and facilitated strategic partnerships to help the company achieve rapid scale. “As prior investors in EPC Power, we have every confidence that the company will meet its ambitious and environmentally critical objectives and we are excited to partner with Goldman Sachs for the next stage of EPC Power’s growth.”

The strategic investment positions EPC Power to further expand to be ready to meet the growing demand for renewable energy storage markets. Global energy storage installations are projected to multiply 20 times by the end of 2030 compared to the end of 2020, according to BloombergNEF’s 2021 Global Energy Storage Outlook, with the U.S. currently being the world’s largest market. Wood Mackenzie sees the United States on a path to be a 27 GW annual market by 2031, and 83% of that figure will be utility-scale storage.