Dear customers, partners, colleagues and friends of the solar community,

Over the last few months, we have been working to make our products available worldwide by means of mass production and global distribution. Our extended distributor and installer network, ranging from the United States to Australia, brings SolarEdge PV products to new markets and will allow us to deliver 50MW of electricity this year.

June began with Intersolar Europe, the world’s largest exhibition for the solar industry. This year, SolarEdge held an extensive display of our latest products and innovations, including PV modules with embedded SolarEdge power optimizers, as well as a new range of inverters, monitoring solutions, and software tools. The SolarEdge booth was particularly busy with thousands of visitors and industry experts - it was a great pleasure to meet everybody face to face. Be sure to read more about our recent innovations in a separate item just below this one.

In other news, SolarEdge’s commitment towards providing the most efficient PV systems to its customers was recognized last month by the California Energy Commission (CEC), which placed the SolarEdge single phase inverters at the top of the List of Eligible Inverters, with the highest weighted efficiency rating of up to 97.5%.

Last month, SolarEdge was named Red Herring 100 Europe Award Winner for 2010, a prestigious award honoring the most promising private technology ventures across Europe. Past winners of the Red Herring 100 Award include Google, Yahoo and Skype.

We are looking forward to seeing you in our partners’ booths at Intersolar North America. Click here for more details.

Guy Sella, CEO

Besides announcing our new inverters and power optimizers, Intersolar was an excellent opportunity to launch the SolarEdge installer software tools that make the design and installation of the SolarEdge system even easier than before:

Site Design Tool - recommends string layout and inverter and power optimizer models, per given site sizing. Multi-faceted roofs and unequal string length layouts are supported.

Site Mapping Tool - a Smartphone application that enables fast scanning of the power optimizer and inverter barcodes to create a ‘bird’s-eye-view’ layout of any site at module-level, on the spot. The resulting layout map is uploaded to our monitoring web portal to enhance remote diagnostics.

Inverter Configuration Tool - enables simple configuration of one or multiple inverters directly from the installer’s laptop. The performance of each module is presented as well to provide complete installation verification feedback on-site, at the module-level, without manual measurements or internet connectivity.

PVsyst, developed by the University of Geneva, is a popular software package for the sizing, simulation and data analysis of complete PV systems. The upcoming version release allows the design of systems using SolarEdge power optimizers and inverters, enabling simple planning of systems with all the SolarEdge design flexibility benefits, as well as providing an added energy calculation of SolarEdge optimized installations. Read more about the new PVSyst version.

The California Energy Management Commission (CEC) has published an updated List of Eligible Inverters, placing the SolarEdge range of single-phase 3.3kW-6kW PV inverters at the highest efficiency ranking with up to 97.5% weighted efficiency rating.

The new rating means that US system owners will now benefit from higher government incentive payments, as some incentive calculation methods (such as CSI’s EPBB) are directly related to the CEC inverter efficiency rating. Learn more here.

SolarEdge’s first grid connected installation in the San-Diego area was completed shortly after the CEC inclusion (see image), and raised a lot of interest among solar professionals. The President of Photon Solar Power Inc., the solar contractor and integrator of the project, highlighted the benefits from this optimized system.

The latest SolarEdge expansion of business activity in the USA comes following the recent appointment of John Berdner as General Manager for North America. Mr. Berdner brings to SolarEdge a depth of knowledge of the US solar marketplace, gained during 30 years of PV experience, which includes being the founder and president of SMA America, Inc. between 2000-2006, and activity in the regulatory compliance community.