Headed by its founder, Chairman and President Yong Qiang Ding, the startup rolled out its top notch product offerings in 2011. That same year, Growatt had already become the largest exporter of PV inverters in China. It also took a 23% market share in Australia that year.
Almost 10 years later, in December 2019, I had the good fortune to meet with David Ding, as the Growatt founder is known to people outside China. We met on a Saturday, which seemed a rather ordinary matter to this energetic and focused entrepreneur. We spoke of residential PV and the greater vision of a “smart home,” a focus area at Growatt from the start as the company seeks to aid homeowners in easily managing their PV array, battery storage, electric vehicle (EV), and key appliances in the
home, all via smartphone.
A key element of the smart home is the Battery Energy Storage System (BESS). Building on its success in Europe and Australia (pp. 8-9), Growatt was already shipping 2,000 BESS units to customers in these two markets when a colleague and I met David Ding and his team at the company’s headquarters in December 2019.
Fast forward a year and Growatt had further perfected BESS and smart home technology with its innovative GroHome residential solution. In awarding pv magazine’s Publisher’s Pick Award to Growatt in early 2021, I commented on how the company had successfully created an easy-to-use integrated smart home solution – a feat that few others in the clean tech sector have managed.
“There has been much talk about smart homes, but not many easy-to-use integrated solutions,” I said at the time. “Growatt’s GroHome system is a true smart home enabler and as such a trailblazing solution in making the home more energy efficient and less reliant on external energy sources. It also puts the homeowner in the center as both consumer and ‘prosumer,’ putting a convenient app at his or her fingertips to manage the system and optimize self-consumption.”
In an era of rising energy prices and declining feed-in and netmetering tariffs, boosting self-consumption has become a central tenet of residential PV and BESS systems and smart homes in general. The GroHome suite of products provides the perfect solution for full-home electrification, both for the homeowner and the grid operator, since loads are primarily served by distributed energy resources inside the home or on its roof, minimizing the impact of further electrification on grid stability.
A long focus on residential solutions has made Growatt the number one global supplier of residential inverters, according to the analysts at IHS Markit. The company had shipped over 3.8 million units and supplied over 40 GW globally at the end of 2021. But the manufacturer has also devoted significant resources to provide compelling solutions to the C&I segment and supply integrated microgrid solutions.
BESS is becoming much more relevant in these two markets as well, and as you can read in this special edition, the modular battery platform that Growatt provides is also suited to addressing the requirements of these larger-scale projects, especially where
more “grid-friendly” installations are needed to support distribution grids rather than create curtailment scenarios.
In all these years of Growatt’s trailblazing success, its emphasis on quality has been fundamental. In this edition we go through the five-step quality for battery manufacturing QA, which illustrates how essential quality and safety are to David Ding and his entire team. And with over 23 offices around the world, customers can be assured of timely service and support in case of need.
We hope you enjoy this 2022 special edition we have developed with inverter and smart home pioneer Growatt. As trade shows reemerge this year in Europe and other markets, be sure to look for Growatt among the exhibitors. You will not be disappointed.
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