Chinese battery manufacturer, BYD and Germany-based inverter maker, Kostal announced their inking of a future strategic partnership.
At an event held in Pingshan, Shenzen, China, representatives of the two companies signed a deal, which will see them further marry their products to provide storage solutions to the residential and commercial solar segments in the European market, and globally.
Under a partnership announced in 2017, Kostal began lining up its Piko inverter offering with BYD’s Battery-Box. It later included other product lines, such as the Plenticore plus.
The new strategic partnership will now see the joint development of specially-bundled solutions, in order to offer an end-to-end energy storage solution.
“We have started offering their Battery-Box HV, which was the first direct high voltage solution on the market, as a bundle with our Piko inverters last year, which turned out to generate high interest in the market,” said Christof Kiesel, Product Manager for PV inverters and storage systems at Kostal.
“Since then we have been working successfully on expanding the joint offering, including solutions with our latest inverter product line Plenticore, and will continue to do so with joint developments under the new strategic agreement.”
In late 2017, in its forecast of the inverter market landscape for 2018, GTM Research said that inverter and battery manufacturer partnerships would be a critical component of market dynamism.
As batteries and inverters are taking on ever more complicated and digitally enabled tasks, streamlined communication interfaces and architectures will be vital to enable this process further. Therefore, such partnerships will result in standardized system components that link inverters and batteries.
GTM Research further reported that an increasing share of integrated solutions will characterize this year's market. Previously, third-party providers integrated batteries and inverters into storage systems. Now inverter and battery manufacturers are singling out these third parties again to come up with new solutions.
In addition to the hardware coupling systems, companies are likely to integrate digital energy management solutions. Since these continuously communicate between inverter and batteries standardized communications protocols and interfaces are vital to these offerings.
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