Sungrow Shows Off New Solar Gear For Australia

Sungrow home battery and inverter

China’s Sungrow launched its latest inverters and batteries for the Australian residential and commercial market at the Solar & Storage Live Australia event held in Brisbane last week.

Founded in 1997 by University Professor Cao Renxian, Sungrow established a presence in the Australian market in 2012 and has earned a reputation here for good quality equipment at competitive pricing points that installers generally seem to like working with. While the company has been manufacturing inverters for decades, energy storage is a more recent addition.

And on that note …

SBH200-400 Battery

A high-voltage battery with Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) cells, the new SBH range starts out with the SBH200 as the base model. Boasting 20kWh useable capacity, it’s made up of four 5kWh modules, a battery management system (BMS) and offers a very respectable 14kW of power.

The dimensions of the SBH200 are 675mm x 900 mmm x 350 mm.

The SBH200 weighs in at 196 kilograms, with each 5kWh module weighing 45kg; light enough to be easily carried by two people. With no cabling between modules, adding extra is a simple task and another four can be added to a single unit; making it an SBH400 with 40 kWh of useable capacity and 28.16kW of power. Up to 4 units with 8 module stacks each can be in parallel, for a capacity of 160 kWh.

A datasheet for the SBH battery can be found here. As for how much these batteries will set you back, I wasn’t able to determine at the time of writing. But the cost of Sungrow’s other home battery that has proven popular, the SBR HV, is competitive. You can compare solar battery prices and specs here (SBH yet to be added).

SH Hybrid Three-Phase Inverter

Also launched locally at the Solar & Storage Live Australia event were Sungrow’s SH15/20/25T three-phase hybrid inverters: 15kW, 20kW and 25kW respectively. Sungrow says these units have a built-in 63A bypass for whole home backup and a 10 ms seamless switch.

An interesting feature of the SH is three independent Maximum Power Point Trackers (MPPTs). If a home has solar panels on multiple roof areas facing different directions, a solar inverter with multiple MPPTs is often needed to maximise performance; unless the roof areas face east and west and the same number/capacity of panels are installed on each side. Most inverters have two MPPTs, but in the case of the SH (all models), there are three – which will be handy for complex roofs.

A datasheet for the SH range can be found here.

Commenting on the launch, Vice President of Sungrow APAC Joe Zhou said the new products were suitable for a wide range of applications.

“As the world increasingly turns to renewable sources of power, Sungrow remains at the forefront of innovation, committed to providing its customers with the most advanced and reliable solutions for a sustainable future.”

In other recent news from the company, the firm reported Sungrow inverter shipments eclipsed 130GW last year, bringing the company’s overall total to 515 GW as at December 2023. Sungrow battery shipments are ticking along, with 10.5GWh of batteries shipped in 2023.