Canada-headquartered solar microinverter manufacturer Sparq Systems is coming to India to produce its units locally for this growing solar PV market in Asia. It will implement the initiative in a partnership with Jio Things Limited, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries Limited's (RIL) Jio Platforms Ltd.
Sparq specializes in single-phase microinverters for residential and commercial solar electric applications. It uses a proprietary PV solution called the Quad that optimizes 4 PV modules with a single microinverter. The Canadian manufacturer says this simplifies design of solar power plants, thereby lowering the cost of their installation.
It sees the partnership enabling large-scale microinverter manufacturing in India. Sparq plans to engage a 3rd party contract manufacturing base in India to manufacture its microinverters. With Jio, it will collaborate to develop, produce and distribute microinverters.
"Jio's existing strengths in communications, cloud computing, and IoT platforms, will enable a more comprehensive and scalable approach in developing new products for energy solutions," explained Sparq CEO Dr. Praveen Jain.
He added, "We expect that the combination of Jio's scale and technology-leadership and Sparq's software-centric design to enable large-scale manufacturing of microinverters at a competitive cost."
The Canadian manufacturer has sealed certain volume commitments for the initial few years until the capacity volume is stabilized. It also gets certain agreed product margins. A year back in March 2023, Sparq had entered into a sales and distribution agreement with Rolaz Green Energy in India for its microinverters and other products.
Jio's parent RIL is already taking big steps into power electronics having announced plans for a gigafab in August 2022, along with 4 other gigafabs for solar PV, fuel cell, energy storage and electrolyzers (see Reliance Announces Power Electronics Giga Fab).