Searches for photovoltaic (PV)/solar combiners are down 70% overall on Engineering360 since 2018. The biggest drop in searches by industry segment are those conducted by workers in the oil and gas and utilities sectors. Despite the trend, searches from those in the fabricated metals sector have doubled.

Solar combiners bring together the output of several solar strings. They provide a cumulative voltage from PV panels and PV panel strings and route the power to a controller or inverter. Off-grid and large grid-tied systems benefit from the overcurrent protection these combiners provide.

Solar combiners are a good indicator of the large-scale adoption of solar technology because they are a key component of a PV system. Solar installations have increased, especially in residential and commercial applications, and also among utility-scale power providers. Site-specific industrial applications may still find it difficult to adopt solar energy due to high energy demand and need for a consistent power supply that is not subject to the intermittency of PV.

Because residential and commercial users typically buy their electricity from the local utility, they are not directly affected by the price of coal and natural gas, which are the primary fuels for fossil-generated electricity. Instead they are often motivated by public policy incentives, long-term price guarantees and social goals such as carbon footprint reduction. Utilities are combining PV with battery energy storage, which is increasingly cost-competitive and reliable. The U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot program, that was created in 2011 to reduce the costs of solar energy by 75%, has made progress to bring down the cost of PV, and suppliers, many of them based in China, have scaled the technology so that it is more economically viable compared with a decade ago.

Although the industrial sector is not a major adopter of PV, industries that buy electricity from the grid are likely consuming renewable energy of some sort, given the widespread growth of wind and solar installations in recent years.