Enphase Energy’s plan to start manufacturing microinverters at a plant outside Toronto is being hailed as proof that Ontario’s Green Energy Act is working.
Paul Nahi, Enphase’s chief executive officer, said that the company’s decision to open its first manufacturing plant outside of China was driven by the laws that require locally produced equipment for use in wind and solar.
An editorial today in The Globe and Mail, a national Canadian paper, quotes Nahi as saying:
It is very unlikely that we would have set up another manufacturing facility in Ontario, had it not been for this requirement.
Ontario’s green energy industry has taken off like a rocket in recent months, starting with the announcement of a $7 billion wind and solar project with Samsung and Korea Electric.
The province’s feed-in tariff program and green energy legislation has also enticed Germany’s Bosch Solar and Indian company Solar Semiconductor Inc. to announce plants.
Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty was criticized for offering a “sweetheart” deal to Samsung but his overall plan to turn Ontario into a green energy manufacturing hub seems to be paying off quickly.
McGuinty said at the Samsung announcement in January:
Above all this means that Ontario is officially the place to be for green energy manufacturing in North America… During the next several years the U.S. is going to build many many thousand of megawatts of energy from renewables. Someone is going to have to supply that technology.
Now Enphase is getting in too.
Petaluma, Calif.-based Enphase recently raised $40 million in private financing to fund the plant.
The company’s photovoltaic microinverters, which are manufactured by its partner Flextronics, change power generated by individual solar panels from direct current into alternating current and improve the efficiency of the system.
PV-tech.org reports that the production line will have an initial capacity of 500,000 microinverters (100 megawatts) in the first year with plans to go to one million units by 2011.
Installers that use the microinverters will qualify to participate in the feed-in tariff program.