Despite the many economic, environmental and social benefits of clean energy generation, solar, wind and battery storage introduce complexities the grid was not designed to accommodate. The project of electrifying of our power structure, while also replacing fossil fuels, requires components, systems and digital management tools.
Complicating the transition is the fact that it comes at a time of increased electricity demand. After decades of relatively flat demand, which eased the replacement of legacy fossil-fueled sources with renewable ones, new loads from AI data centers, crypto-mining and electric vehicle (EV) charging are changing the grid’s needs. Brian Nelson, renewables segment leader for ABB, told pv magazine USA that the characteristics of these new sources and loads are requiring the existing grid to handle situations for which it wasn’t designed.
“Data center demands can make the power signal in the surrounding area less sinusoidal and have some spikes in there that have to be managed,” Nelson said. “And 10 years ago, I don’t think that we had so many of those problems.”
Nelson suggested that we take a serious look and make sure that our devices are prepared for the grid of the future, which he said includes bi-directional power flows and “maybe a dirtier power signal.”
“Our devices have to handle those transients and be more robust,” Nelson noted. “And that’s something that our research and engineering teams take very seriously – to make sure that we have the right capabilities for our components to be ready for what’s coming.”
According to Nelson, the electrification industry requires more power densities in the collection systems on the generation side and in the utility substations managing grid interconnections and transport of power to consumers.
“As project sizes have gotten larger and larger, there’s a demand for components that go inside of those devices, inverters specifically, but just collection systems as well,” he said. “There’s a higher need for more power dense components. So, think circuit breakers and switches and things like that.”
ABB divested itself of its solar inverter business in 2019 with its sale to Italy’s Finmer ABB said disposing of the low-margin unit would help its electrification business reach its overall profit margin aim of 15% to 19%.
At the time there was much uncertainty in the market. Tarak Mehta, then president of ABB’s Electrification business, said the company wanted to focus on higher growth markets, such as motion control, and that Finmer would be a good steward of its solar inverter products. He added that ABB would continue to integrate solar power into a range of markets, including smart buildings, energy storage and electric vehicle charging.
Fast forward to 2025 and the dynamics of the solar power market have changed with the support of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Earlier this month, ABB announced the acquisitions of Lumin, an energy management company, and Gamesa Electric’s inverter and converter segment. The former expands the company’s portfolio in the smart buildings segment. The latter, however, seems to see ABB returning to the solar inverter and battery-storage converter marketplace.
Whether ABB-branded inverter and converter products are returning to solar and storage projects remains to be seen. Nelson says his electrification priorities are focused on developing components to facilitate the industry’s move from 1,500 V to 2,000 V for DC power. A recent white paper on the transition said higher VDC capacity allow for longer strings of solar panels, fewer combiner boxes, reduced wiring and underground trenching requirements, significantly reduced energy losses, and a lower cost per kWh.
Image: ABB Renewables
“As we think about solar collection systems specifically that voltage has been increasing over time and I do not expect that to change,” Nelson said. “So we have the opportunity to really be an enabler of more power by making our components able to handle higher voltages, higher currents, which then allows more batteries, more solar modules to really get those projects to those incredible levels that we’ve seen announced in the last couple of years.”
Over and above the physical capabilities of components needed for a grid more dependent on larger percentages of renewable generation and larger individual projects is the information needed for grid safety and realization of economic benefits. In addition, the grid of the future will be incorporating more bi-directional capability, which was not its original function.
Bi-directional requirements are increasing the reliance on lithium-ion batteries for both transportation and utility-scale energy storage. According to Nelson, all of this means incorporating switching digitization and power management systems, which will gain a more complete understanding of what is going on.
“Something that we are starting to see with digitally enabled devices in the field, maybe that’s the inverter connected to the solar farm or the energy storage system, but also a tie-in to what’s happening in the substation as well,” he said. “So at a very high level, you can really understand the full operations of those plants, which increases obviously efficiency and productivity, which at the end of the day is what these developers and operators want as a part of their businesses to sell that electricity.”
Alden Phinney, a regional director of energy services firm GridBeyond, is co-author of a recent report that said energy providers require a comprehensive understanding of conditions in service areas in which they operate in order to make a profit. Analysis of local conditions helps inform optimized bid strategies that enable participants to adjust their storage capabilities to match market conditions and mitigate risks from price fluctuations.
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