Intersolar North America and the SMA solar van’s debut

The solar industry’s best and brightest gathered on the West Coast earlier this month in San Francisco at Intersolar North America. Always on the leading edge, we decided to shake up our normal presence by forgoing a standard booth and opting to show folks a glimpse of what our inverters can do.

The SMA solar van as seen from Intersolar’s meeting rooms, with a crowd of visitors.

Those who stopped by our mobile-booth, the SMA solar van, were treated to free cell phone charging and demonstrations from live-equipment, most notably our AC-coupled Sunny Island system featuring a small battery bank that kept the power flowing during the morning fog and shade over our parking spot.

The inside tour

Though the solar van was a hot spot to cool off outside the show, there was still plenty to see inside. We especially liked seeing our inverters at the Shoals and MidNite Solar booths.

SMA’s Solar Academy kept people on their toes with triple-threat training, educating attendees on the Sunny Tripower, Sunny Boy TL-US with SPS and Sunny Boy 240-US micro inverter.

And for the keen observer, Team SMA was attending in great force, roaming the show floor to talk with people and see what’s happening around the solar industry.

Shoals’ Sunny Tripower mounting system was proudly on display for show attendees.

Educating for the future

Diving deeper into the future challenges the solar industry faces, our own Ravi Dodballapur, manager of application engineering, presented on Overcoming the Challenges of Distributed PV Generation. Ravi was able to share his experiences in working with utility interconnection engineers to educate our industry on current and future inverter capabilities.

Jim Morgenson, director of strategic accounts, contributed to a panel on Emerging Standards for Electricity Storage in PV Systems, a hot topic across the solar industry as skyrocketing interest in energy storage has caught the attention of manufacturers, utilities and regulators alike.

At the other end of the solar spectrum, Wes Kennedy, applications engineer, shared his hybrid technology expertise during a presentation of Intelligent Integration of Photovoltaics into Diesel Systems. Wes spent nearly 20 years installing solar for customers before the rise of the grid-tied market, focusing almost exclusively on hybrid systems with diesel generators or batteries.

2015 and beyond

Altogether, it was a great week at Intersolar and we look forward to what the rest of this year brings. This truly is an exciting time for the solar industry and we’re already looking forward to Intersolar 2015. Everyone at SMA is thrilled about what lies ahead!