The Environment

Information technology (IT) was hardly a common concept 20 years ago, but oday it's hard to imagine doing business without it. Yet for most of its existence, the energy industry has made little use of IT — and that's been the case with the clean energy industry as well. Enphase Energy is trying to change that paradigm. The start-up provides a solar energy management system, which uses special micro-inverters designed to significantly boost the efficiency of any solar set up. Normally, solar installations contain a number of solar panels, but the entire installation shares one inverter, which converts the electricity generated by all the panels for use in our homes and businesses. If there's a fault in one panel, the entire system can slow down — just like a chain of Christmas lights goes out if one bulb malfunctions. Enphase puts micro-inverters on each individual panel in an installation, which boosts overall productivity. Even better, Enphase's micro-inverters communicate via the Internet, allowing the company to track the performance of every solar panel during every minute of every day. "It's a blending of information technology and power," says Paul Nahi, Enphase's CEO. "We make sure every system performs to its maximum."