Enphase Boosts its Energy Management Platform with Smart EV Charging

Enphase Energy develops proprietary technology for the sustainable energy industry. After successfully commercializing its unique microinverter device for solar energy systems almost two decades ago, the company’s journey evolved into building out a fully-fledged energy management system—a platform allowing homeowners to better manage electricity at home and from the utility grid. With its recent acquisition of ClipperCreek, the company entered the electric vehicle (EV) market and supercharged the Enphase solution with an expanded product portfolio.

Raghu Belur, a Silicon Valley native, drives product development at Enphase. He holds an MSc in engineering from Texas A&M University and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley. He has almost three decades of experience making products to power the clean energy transition for homeowners and businesses.

“I’ve spent all my life in Silicon Valley, where the essential underlying notion is to do something better and to think outside of the box,” Belur, the co-founder and chief product officer of Enphase, told the California Business Journal. He was involved in five startups in his career—two of which he started, and at three, he worked at from the very early stages. Yet, his most impressive business endeavor has been Enphase, which he co-founded with Martin Fornage in 2006.

“Martin and I were doodling on the whiteboard back in 2005, thinking about our new startup. We looked at incumbent technology, and following its evolution at large, we thought everything was moving to a decentralized or distributed architecture,” Belur said. He and Fornage were forward thinkers in looking into decentralization. They explored the idea well before Bitcoin’s launch in January 2009, which marks the de-facto start of decentralization entering public consciousness in a mainstream way.

“We thought about decentralization in network parlance. Our focus was making the endpoints independent of a central authority, empowering them to make independent decisions. When we looked at the world of energy, we realized that for the past 125 years, the industry had been dominated by a centralized nature. Still today, central authorities generate and distribute energy to households, which are passive system members. We wanted to change that,” Belur said.

The two founders started thinking about a household as a distributed architecture within the home. Their ideation resulted in the birth of the world’s first microinverter, which revolutionized the solar industry.

“When we started, we knew that we were solving the decentralization issue of energy, which is a broad topic. We decided to focus on solar energy, a centralized system. We thought every single solar energy system module installed in a house should be able to communicate with each other. We wanted to make the information exchange bidirectional to optimize this macro environment,” Belur said.

Belur and Fornage built a visionary technology that was effectively similar to the Internet of Things. As a concept, IoT is estimated to have emerged in 2008 and 2009, when the number of devices connected to the internet surpassed the number of people online.

“In the early days of Enphase, even the power conversion that we were doing on the back of every single module was based on custom semiconductors in software. We built our own chip—a digital device running a full software stack. Today, it’s a hardware that is interoperable with most technology worldwide,” Belur said.

Enphase technology is the conductor of an orchestra of energy generators and users in a household, allowing residents to optimize their energy usage.

“Our view as entrepreneurs wasn’t solving a solar problem. We wanted to solve an energy problem. So the next logical step was introducing batteries to our platform,” Belur said. Since then, the platform has grown and allows for integration with other energy technologies, such as heat pumps. With their most recent purchase, Enphase can also cater to the needs of electric vehicles.

Cruising into EV Charging Technologies

Last year, California surpassed one million EVs sold, more than the total sales of the following ten states combined and seven times greater than the next closest state. In anticipation of EV growth, Enphase purchased ClipperCreek to add EV chargers to its energy management system offering.

Criticism against the spread of EVs often attacks the electricity grid. EV opponents assert that switching to EV technology would overburden current infrastructures and is unsustainable. Belur instead sees it as progress. “EV penetration, considering the overall mix of vehicles, is still low. But, if you think about it, 90% of all EV charging happens at home. As EV adoption increases, distribution infrastructure comes under stress. We have the solution for that,” the product chief said.

“Generate your energy locally, store your energy locally, and use it intelligently, locally. People buy EVs because they want to be clean. So, they shouldn’t rely on the central grid, where non-renewable sources largely produce energy. Enphase solutions empower households to generate, store, and distribute their own clean energy, all across their macro-environment,” Belur said. This is where Enphase’s new intelligent EV charger plugs into the system.

Last October, the company launched its smartest EV charger yet, the IQ EV Charger. One of the toughest parts about bringing home a new EV is how to add a charging unit at home. Enphase’s new IQ line of EV chargers makes setting up home charging for your electric vehicle easy. Customers can choose from plug-in or hardwired options, both equipped with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. But, the innovation does not stop there.

All charging stations connect to the Enphase App to help monitor, schedule, and control how the vehicle charges. Users can schedule their overnight charges to save money by opting for off-peak rates, while the Storm Guard function ensures that vehicles get to full charge if the weather forecast threatens a power grid failure. These chargers can integrate with an Enphase solar and battery system, lowering monthly costs, offering more control, and reducing the carbon footprint.

Supercharging its system functionality, Enphase is planning to make EV chargers bidirectional. In practice, it would mean an EV parked at the home becomes a de-facto portable battery, which can be used as a power source. This can prove to be beneficial for users when electricity prices are high. Using the Enphase system, household residents can reduce the need for electricity from the grid at a higher tariff in peak times and use their EVs as a battery to cater to their energy needs. This allows users to wait and buy electricity from the grid when prices are better. Furthermore, the EV battery – when connected to a home energy system through the bidirectional charger – can provide backup power in the event of a power outage. Overall, this system unlocks energy flexibility and resiliency.

Enphase’s approach to whole-home energy management is designed to provide value for homeowners, the central electricity grid, and the environment.

“I think decentralized distributed architectures always win in the long run. It doesn’t mean that different forms of energy—nuclear, wind, geothermal, or pumped hydro—are not valid sources. But at the end of the day, you have to think about how to give the power to the homeowner. You must give them complete control and independence, which can only be done through a fully decentralized, distributed architecture. It’s essentially the democratization of energy,” Belur concluded.

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