A solar titan born before us – Esdec buys IronRidge and Quick Mount PV

The European rooftop solar racking manufacturer launched in the United States last year and has now bought three US residential racking companies that represent 60% of the market, with greater than $250 million in combined revenue.

Image: Ironridge

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Esdec, founded by two brothers from the Netherlands who thought they could come up with a more refined solar racking system for their residential installations in 2004, has purchased Ironridge and Quick Mount PV. Per Esdec, the companies represent 60% of the residential solar racking market, and the group totals $250 million in annual revenue.

All around these transactions there is growth to be seen. And, if there is one company buying a whole bunch of other companies, it might be interpreted that there is now a second manufacturing branch within the solar industry that is now making solid money, behind the recently successful residential inverter manufacturers SolarEdge and EnPhase.

For instance, IronRidge has been building racking since 1996 and was the first residential company I ever bought from in 2008 – and their racking is under roughly 4-5 GW of solar power. EcoFasten Solar, at the time of their acquisition in November, had installed 3 GW of its rooftop solar mounting systems and projected themselves to grow 20% in 2018, from 400 MW deployed in 2017 to 480 MW.

The purchase of Quick Mount PV brings to the table a company that was founded in 2006 and just recently announced adding a second shift for the first time at its Walnut Creek, Calif., manufacturing facility — increasing the company’s annual production capacity to 1.2 gigawatts. A tweet from CEO Yann Brandt said the company had delivered greater than 13 million mounts in its lifetime. Yann noted that the group projects it will deploy 1.7 GW in the USA in 2019 – really close to 60% of a projected 3 GW residential solar market.

And of course Esdec themselves, as of their November 2018 press announcing the purchase of EcoFasten Solar, suggested they’d deployed 1.9 GWdc in the wholes of their career that started somewhere around 2004. Totalling all these companies – we get way into the double digits of gigawatts deployed.

At Solar Power International in 2018, pv magazine USA got to see the above FlatFix as it moved around the in the joint. The component above is the self-leveling baseplate, or a “floating foot” as it was described in the booth. Its ability to move allows the installation crew to get parts into place a bit easier, and as the roof shifts over time – instead of putting pressure on metal parts – the feet give a bit in both directions.

The most compelling argument of the hardware is that you can get away with a single tool to build a solar racking system. And in case you’d like to learn how to install their product – watch a video:

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