Enphase's Rooftop Solar Revolution

Forbes.com (Oct 21 2010) Solar

1. Martin Fornage found the idea for his company on a roof in 2005. A successful Silicon Valley telecom engineer who worked at Cerent (which was bought by Cisco), he had solar panels put on his home and needed an electrician to install a central inverter to convert the direct current (DC) power produced by the system into the alternating current (AC) power used in homes and businesses. Why didn't each solar panel have its own inverter? That would make installing the panels easier (no electrician needed) and safer (no high-voltage issues). So Fornage, 47, and Raghu Belur, 43, an electrical engineer Fornage had worked with at Cisco, founded Enphase Energy in March 2006, 40 miles north of San Francisco in Petaluma, Calif., home to several telecom companies. They spent a year designing a new kind of inverter called a microinverter, harnessing expertise in semiconductors, software, communications and power systems ... (Read Full Article)

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