Who’s on top of the residential solar-plus-storage market?

Homeowners are pairing battery backup with solar for many reasons including ensured resilience and as a response to increasing cuts to net metering programs. Wood Mackenzie recently launched its US Distributed Solar-plus-storage Leaderboard to track this market, and found that in Q3 2023, 11% of residential solar and 5% of non-residential solar installations are paired with storage.

While there have been many new entrants to this market in the past year, the Wood Mac report found that just three vendors have held an average of 80% of the market from 2018 through Q3 2023: Tesla, LG and Enphase. But the tide is turning as others move into top spots, and new entrants with well-known names offer complete solutions.

“These companies continue to dominate the market; however, they have recently come under pressure from new entrants,” said Max Issokson, a research analyst at Wood Mackenzie and author of the new report. “Whereas Tesla and LG products were installed on 96% of residential solar-plus-storage projects in 2018, they made up 65% of installations in 2023 through Q3.”

Tesla claims the top spot in Wood Mackenzie’s residential solar-plus-storage rankings with a market share of 30.2% in 2023 through Q3, followed by Sunrun at 20.5% and SunPower at 4.6%.

The market has opened up to many new entrants in part due to the increase in residential solar installations spurred by passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which boosted the Investment Tax Credit to 30% through 2032. Well-known energy equipment companies including SunPower, Generac and SolarEdge are relatively new entrants who quickly moved into top spots on the Leaderboard.

SunPower made a few good moves that propelled it toward the top of the chart for residential storage. For example, the company signed a collaboration agreement with General Motors to deploy home energy storage systems for residential electric vehicle charging and was named GM’s preferred EV charger installer and solar provider. The company also signed an agreement with a large home builder, Dream Finders Homes, to deploy its solar-plus-storage system on its new homes.

Generac, a leader in traditional generators, entered the solar, EV charger and residential solar-plus-storage markets in recent years. Its PWRcell is the residential storage product, and coupled with the Concerto platform that is part of Generac Grid Services, it provides a distributed energy resource management system (DERMS) that can detect spikes in demand, which signal the batteries to automatically dispatch clean energy based on real-time grid conditions. Generac signed on with Southern California Edison (SCE) as a virtual power plant participant, using this solution to scale the utility’s Power Flex program.

Enphase Energy, long known for its microinverters, is also in the residential storage business. The company is eyeing the California residential solar market for its new Enphase Energy System with the IQ Battery 5P. The California NEM 3.0 went into effect in April is slashing payments by 75% for excess solar production sent to the grid. Enphase reports that its system is optimized to support the new NEM 3.0 rules by enabling self-consumption and exporting energy at the appropriate times to create maximum value.

“California continues to be one of our top markets and the new IQ Battery 5P will enable our customers to maximize the value of their home solar systems with the new net metering rules,” said Bryson Solomon, chief executive officer of Infinity Energy, a Rocklin, Calif.-based installer of residential and commercial solar and storage.

According to the Wood Mac report, the solar-plus-storage market is much more consolidated than the residential installation market. The top five players in the residential solar-plus-storage market hold 59% of the market, whereas the top five in residential solar hold just 24%, noted Issokson.

Even with the top five players holding more than half the market, other companies have entered the market with residential offerings. A few of these include FranklinWH, SMA and Schneider Electric.

The integrated battery and control system in the Franklin Whole Home (WH) system, which debuted in 2022, has a built-in adaptive learning algorithms is inverter-agnostic, comes EV charger ready, and is designed to turn a home into a micro-grid when the grid is down, the company reports. According to the Wood Mac report, FranklinWH, less than two years after launching its first storage project, ranks eighth among manufacturers nationally.

Inverter specialist SMA recently announced a new residential energy storage solution that includes the Sunny Boy Smart Energy hybrid inverter. The company reports that the energy storage solution can be equipped with SMA’s Backup Secure to control the home’s energy, sending it to chosen appliances when needed.

Schneider Home platform is an energy management system (EMS) that integrates energy endpoints and household appliances in one interface, and it can be monitored with a single smartphone application. Released a year ago at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the company says that Schneider’s residential system allows users to not only monitor the energy consumption of household appliances, but it allows users to prioritize power during outages.

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