Sarika Agarwal has been working at SMA Altenso for five years. The subsidiary of SMA was founded in 2014 and focuses on innovative off-grid, hybrid, and battery-based projects with a focus on the Altenso regions (Africa, Central America and Caribbean, Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Pacific). As a System Development Engineer, Sarika is now a battery specialist. She tells us in an interview how she came to SMA and why she is so motivated by working on the energy transition.

As a product manager at SMA, Isabella Caschetto and her team develop digital services for new business models of large-scale PV and battery storage systems – essential energy sources for the future renewable energy supply. Customers include PV and battery power plant operators as well as grid operators from all over the world. For them, grid stability and the supply reliability of renewable energies are key issues.

Christiane Schumacher spent seven years working in SMA’s marketing team. She then sought fresh challenges and acquired experience in other industries and functional areas. But now she’s back at SMA, heading Business Development & Partner Management. In this interview, she tells us why she came back to us and what she has learned during her career.

Annabell Thomin’s job is to ensure that each and every SMA employee has the latest software on their PC. As an IT specialist, she is responsible for the internal software store, where employees can find all the programs they need for their everyday work. But Annabell started at the company in logistics.

How do I tackle new and complex issues? What can I offer others and where can they help me? These questions relating to collaboration are central in today’s information society in a constantly changing world. Encouraging employees to communicate and share ideas is all the more important. In this interview, Anne Schreiber, Change Agent at SMA, explains how the method of Working Out Loud can help.

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.

It has been six years since the world’s nations agreed to limit man-made global warming to significantly below 2 °C in the landmark Paris Agreement. Since then, there have been many announcements and promises. But we are still waiting for concrete steps and effective measures to curb the climate crisis. It is crucial that COP26, the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow next week, finally brings a breakthrough. Before it is too late.

U.S. President Joe Biden has invited 40 international heads of government to a virtual climate summit he is hosting tomorrow, on Earth Day. An important initiative, because only swift joint action can stop the increasingly dramatic global warming to which the recently published UN climate report 2020 again attests.

SMA generated over one billion euros in sales and doubled its operating result in 2020 despite the coronavirus crisis – as the Managing Board forecast at the start of the crisis. We put three questions about this to Chief Executive Officer Jürgen Reinert.

A strange year in every respect is coming to an end. The global corona crisis has presented us all with unexpected challenges in recent months, which had to be mastered from one day to the next. In the process, however, we have also discovered opportunities and become acquainted with completely new - digital - ways of working together with customers, suppliers and partners. We would like to sincerely thank you for your trust in SMA, especially in a situation that is very challenging for all of us. Let us continue to drive the energy transition forward together in the coming year.