Abstract:
Residential solar has undergone a quiet revolution in power electronics—shifting from centralized string inverters to module-level power electronics (MLPE) like optimizers and microinverters. Each step aimed to improve efficiency, reliability, and control. But current systems remain constrained by rigid architectures and inefficiencies at the edge. This saturation in technology has stalled the progress of home solar and storage technology, but also invites opportunities for new architecture. This talk explores the evolution of these technologies, the design trade-offs behind each generation, and how our approach could reshape home energy systems for greater resilience, modularity, and intelligence. It concludes with a discussion of a new "cellular" power inverter architecture that preserves the best of the legacy approaches while enabling home energy users and installers unprecedented flexibility and cost advantages.
Bio:
Patrick Chapman focused his career on power electronics, particularly with applications to renewable energy generation and storage. He was a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until 2010. Since then, he has held multiple engineering executive positions in industry, including Mainspring Energy, Redwood Materials, Enphase Energy, SunPower Corporation, and as a cofounder of SolarBridge Technologies. In early 2025, he became a cofounder and CEO of Stormentum, Inc., a new venture focused on power conversion for energy storage. Chapman is a Fellow of the IEEE and was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineers.