Solar Nerd articles about: Manufacturers

Panasonic is a big company that is best known for its consumer electronics, but it’s also one of the most popular brands of solar panels. With panel efficiency exceeding 22% and a 25 year warranty that includes labor, Panasonic solar panels are positioned at the “premium” end of the market and compete with other high end manufacturers such as SunPower and REC Group. Though popular, Panasonic has made some changes to its solar division that have created some confusion among consumers.

Tesla’s Energy division gets less attention than its vehicles, but it continues to plug along, with 345 MW of solar panels installed in 2021. For many years, Telsa (and SolarCity before it was acquired by Tesla) installed solar panels from other manufacturers, including Q Cells, LG, and Panasonic. For a few years, Tesla and Panasonic had a partnership to manufacture solar panels at the Gigafactory in Buffalo, but that relationship ended in 2020.

According to Berkeley Lab, a large majority of homeowners are now choosing premium equipment for their home solar systems, including high efficiency solar panels and microinverters. When it comes to panels, one of the brands that’s producing some of the highest efficiency solar panels is REC Group. Founded in Norway in 1996, the company went through the kind of financial difficulties that many solar manufacturers have experienced, culuminating in their acquisition by the Chinese company BlueStar in 2014.

Tesla Energy, the division of Tesla responsible for solar and home battery products, makes the well-known Solar Roof that looks like sleek roofing tiles but generates clean electricity. But the Solar Roof is an expensive product that is best installed on a home that needs a new roof. If you have a newer roof that doesn’t need replacement, it typically doesn’t make financial sense to install a Solar Roof. In fact, Tesla recently dramatically raised the cost of the Solar Roof - double the price, according to some.

Among the premium solar panel manufacturers that are popular in the US, California-based SunPower stands out. Their solar panels are at the top end of efficiency, but they also have an extensive dealer network to support a 25 year product warranty. The strong warranty and installer certification program are some of the reasons why The Solar Nerd network includes several SunPower dealers. While this might make it seem like we’re biased toward SunPower, there are other excellent brands worthy of consideration, such as LG and Solaria.

Homeowners planning to add solar often have a problem of limited roof space. To work around that, solar installers often turn to the highest performance panels so that a solar array can generate more power with fewer panels. Two of the biggest companies in the high performance end of the home solar market are SunPower and LG Solar. You might recognize the name SunPower, but be surprised to learn that LG Solar is a division of LG Electronics, the South Korean electronics behemoth that makes everything from smartphones to TVs to refrigerators.

If you have a home solar system, it won’t keep your house powered in a blackout unless you have a battery system. This is because solar inverters have a feature called anti-islanding. A solar inverter converts direct current (DC) power from solar panels into alternating current (AC) that your home and electric grid use. AC power has a frequency of 60 hz in North America. In normal operation, your solar inverter “listens” for power from the grid, and synchronizes its AC output to that of the grid.

Hanwha Q CELLS is a South Korea-based company that purchased the German solar company Q Cells, forming Hanwha Q CELLS in 2015. An affiliate of the large business conglomerate Hanwha Group, Hanwha Q CELLS has grown to be one of the largest solar panel manufacturers in the world. The newest product in their lineup is the recently released Q.PEAK DUO G10+ series. Hanwha company overview Headquarters Seoul, South Korea Manufacturing Dalton, Georgia; China, Malaysia, South Korea Other locations Germany (R&D) Number of employees 8,500 Ticker symbol HQCL Korean company, but American-made solar panels On September 19, 2019 the company opened its first US-based factory in Dalton, Georgia, where it manufactures Q CELLS solar modules.

There’s a lot of solar panel manufacturers in the marketplace. Chinese companies, spurred by the massive deployment of photovoltaics in China, occupy most of the top 10 spots for largest solar panel manufacturers in the world. The massive scale of the solar industry in China and Southeast Asia makes it hard for US-based companies to compete on price. Because of this, many American companies focus on the high end of the market by working to produce attractive and high efficiency cells.