While I was making research on the best and cheapest inverter on the market today, I found an article from electrek that will make whole lot of sense to my esteem readers.
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Inverter is the most essential part of solar energy system because of its functions. Therefore, it is imperative for you to understand as much as you can concerning solar inverter.
Tesla released a white paper on its new string solar inverter and claims that it is much cheaper than competing inverter solutions from Enphase and SolarEdge.
Over the last few years, the company has started to integrate it increasingly into its own solar installations, and it also supplies it to other solar installers through its certified installer program.
Electrek has now obtained a white paper about its solar inverter that Tesla has been sharing around.
Tesla explained in the white paper’s summary:
Tesla’s mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy. To speed up the adoption of solar and storage in the residential energy sector, we’ve focused on providing products specifically designed for both the system owner and the installer.
To develop the Tesla Solar Inverter, we leveraged our deep industry experience to design an inverter that offered the best value for system owners, while being easy to install, maintain, and service.
Tesla’s main claim in the paper is that its string inverter solution is cheaper at the purchase and through the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE).
In the paper, Tesla admits that its solution results in a lower production by about 1 or 2%:
We then assessed the real-world performance data of these sites to characterize the effects of inverter type on the system’s output.
We compared actual system performance data of sites with different inverter types but similar SES, ensuring only similar roofs were compared.
For the homes that are good for solar (SES 6-10), sites that used optimizers saw energy production gains of 1-2% compared to homes that used Tesla Solar Inverters.
When comparing the cost of Tesla Solar Inverter with MLPEs, it begged the question whether the production gains were worth the increased cost of the MLPEs.
The leading solar inverter company using optimizers is SolarEdge, which Tesla mentions in the white paper and appears to compare its solution to in this case.
Electrek contacted SolarEdge for a comment on the comparison, and we will update if we get an answer.
In the paper, Tesla claims that the trade-off for the lower output was worth it since its analysis resulted in a 6% lower Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE):
