At Solar Energy UK (SEUK), major global PVEP SunEdison said that the UK had become a key market for the company, but rather than citing its PV power plant project business success, the interest was the residential and commercial rooftop markets via installers.
SunEdison has been quietly building its footprint in the UK residential and commercial rooftop markets providing installers with its ‘Silvantis’ series modules.
According to Mark Babcock, vice president, residential & commercial Europe for SunEdison, the company has been supplying modules direct to installers for the last nine months.
“The UK is the first place outside the US we have focused on and being primarily a distributed generation (DG) company the UK is an important market,” said Babcock.
SunEdison like conventional PV module suppliers is more interested in providing solar systems than just modules, but the using its high-performance modules to target installers has been the first step.
Although coy about discussing SunEdison’s next step in the UK DG market, Babcock said that the company expects to be an energy provider to installers, suggesting aside form supplying PV systems that include modules, inverters and monitoring services, energy storage could also be on the cards.
Unlike the rest of the large PV companies, SunEdison outsources its module production to Flextronics a major global electronics assembly outsourcer, enabling the company to select cells and other components in a best of breed approach and take into account local content or imposed duties in the places like the US and Europe.
SunEdison also has a PV project pipeline in the UK of around 100MW and is exhibiting at SEUK for the first time.