In the summer of 2022, the European solar industry was shaken up by a security incident. A hacker took advantage of a weak spot in the observation platform of the Chinese company Solarman and gained access to about 42,000 PV inverters in the Netherlands. This incident also alerted SMA, but did not worry SMA Information Security Manager Marek Seeger too much.

The energy transition will succeed only if the majority of our electricity is generated from renewable energy sources. But these are subject to weather-dependent fluctuations. The SMA Energy System for battery-storage power plants provides grid-forming capability, which is currently provided by decentralized power plants, and feeds green electricity with a stable frequency into the utility grid. This turns power plant owners and operators into key players on the electricity market.

When Dennis Halpape and Alexander Krug journeyed to East Africa for the first time with Kassel-based association TOGETHER – Hilfe für Uganda [Aid for Uganda]  to install a solar system twelve years ago, there was rarely any light to be found for many kilometers in every direction in the region of Kooki after sunset. Today, when it gets dark, there are significantly more lights on in the houses there.

SMA is looking for PV pioneers who laid the foundation for a sustainable, decentralized energy supply with their PV systems many years ago. With their enthusiasm for photovoltaics, they paved the way for today’s energy transition. All PV system operators who installed an SMA solar inverter or battery inverter in the early years of photovoltaics and are still producing solar power today can participate in the photo campaign. SMA will be giving away 15 solar outdoor packages. The closing date for all entries is December 31, 2020.

Solar power production is finally up and running again at full capacity in West Murray, Australia. The generation caps, which were imposed on five PV power plants over a period of seven months, have now been lifted. And this is all thanks to an innovative control software installed on all the inverters in the PV farms. The software was developed by various experts including SMA’s Christian Hardt and Daniel Premm, who worked around the clock to get the job done.

This supermarket is using solar power and an energy management system and is interconnecting all electricity consumers with producers — the result being low electricity costs and lower CO2 emissions.

Visitors to the Hans-Peter Porsche Traumwerk museum in Bavaria can now charge their electric vehicles with solar power while they marvel at the tin toys, model railways and classic cars on show. A 300 kWp PV system supplies not only the building with electricity, but also the charging stations for electric cars and bikes.

Centralized or decentralized? Which design is best suited for large-scale solar systems? Answers can be found in a new whitepaper.

It’s been a year since the residents of the Efficiency House Plus homes in Hügelshart, Germany, moved in. They have already experienced one hot summer and their first winter. So how have these innovative, low-energy homes featuring their own PV systems, battery-storage systems and heat pumps fared during this time?

Regular maintenance of large central inverters is important to ensure maximum efficiency and long-term profitability of the entire PV project. In order to make preventive maintenance work and acute corrections to individual components as easy as possible, SMA presented a new app for electricians at Intersolar 2019. (Video)