SOFAR is a very successful company in PV and storage solutions. What are the reasons for your success?
Allen Cao: I think there are several main factors for it. The first one is, SOFAR is a customer-orientated company. We put a lot of investment on the R&D side. We have a close relationship with our customer and know their real demand. We can design the product and solution to meet the customer's requirements. The second thing is the innovation. We always invent a lot of new technologies according to the customer demand.
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Does this mean that your products are driven by leading technology?
Yea, indeed. On the product side we have the full portfolio regarding the inverters and storage in all the segments, including the residential, C&I and utility size. And the most important thing is SOFAR provide good service. We have built up our local service team to provide timely and effective service response to our customers.
What major trends do you see in the photovoltaic market?
PV and also storage installations are getting more and more. Solar energy becomes the dominant power source in some countries in Europe. And meanwhile, we also see that some countries have applied a dynamic tariff. So with this background, we think it is very important to make the system more intelligent and more open.
How do you prioritize your resources?
Regarding those trends which we're talking about, SOFAR has put a lot of research and innovation. For example, we launched our SOFAR cloud. It is not only the monitoring system, which can apply all of our solutions and products. It is also including some intelligent hardware, which allows our customer to use the system in a smarter way.
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Be so kind and explain this furthermore, please.
For example, you can use the system to decide how to do the arbitrage. You can also decide when to charge and discharge the batteries. Your system can allow to participate the VPP solutions, and also if our customer uses for the self-consumption scenario, the buildings, EMS systems can allow our customer to achieve it.
What role does energy storage play at your company?
It is a very important part. In the past years, we have shipped more than 2.8 gigawatt hours tall over the world,. This is equal to more than 300,000 PCS battery modules. Now it's playing a more and more important role for us. We have been successful in residential storage solutions, and now we are developing C&I storage. For backup we have the Power Magic solutions, which offer 125 kilowatts with 255 kilowatt-hours. Whole solutions with built-in EMS, PCS and BMS. Meanwhile, we also have the utility scale storage, which is starting from 3.44 megawatt-hour solutions. Now we can see for the storage solutions, we also covered residential C&I and utility segments.
So you meet the full range of power storage. What are your goals for the next, say, 12 months in Germany, in Europe?
We believe now to make the solution close to the customer's demand. We have to understand the market. That's why we keep investing in local team. For example, specifically in the dark region, we already have our local marketing team, our local operation team, and we have our local technical support team. Next year we'll keep enhance our team, specifically on the technical support and service team. Then we can make sure our customers have peace of mind, not only to buy the products, but also during the lifetime of the solution. Service and innovation, these are your main focuses.
Interview by Manfred Gorgus
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