Swiss electrification specialist ABB has acquired solar PV inverter and power conversion system (PCS) producer Gamesa Electric for an undisclosed sum.
ABB said the acquired portfolio, which was previously owned by Gamesa Electric’s parent company Siemens Gamesa, includes utility-scale solar PV inverters, PCS for industrial battery energy storage systems (BESS) and wind power converters. It also includes “key resources” in India, China, the US and Australia, and two converter factories in Madrid and Valencia, Spain. The acquisition began in December 2024.
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Gamesa Electric has a history of business in the wind power converter and generator sector, as well as in the solar PV and BESS industries. ABB said the acquisition increases its total serviceable installed base of wind converters by approximately 46GW.
In an announcement, the company positioned the acquisition as a response to worldwide growth of renewable energy and the role that solar PV and wind power are expected to play in the future of energy generation.
“By combining ABB’s global reach and Gamesa Electric’s portfolio and expertise, the company is well positioned to capture growing demand and accelerate renewable energy adoption worldwide,” said Daniel Gerber, business line manager, renewable power, at ABB’s Motion High Power division.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) said last month that solar would play a “pivotal” role in meeting electricity demand growth over the next decade, and has forecast a 60% increase in global renewable energy generation from 2024 to 2030.
ABB is looking to capitalise on the predictable demand for electrical equipment components for solar PV projects, BESS and wind power plants; PCS and inverters are essential to the operation of renewable energy assets, even though they represent a small portion of a project’s cost. As demand for renewables grows over the coming years, inverter and PCS demand will follow suit.
Swiss-headquartered Hitachi Energy acquired a PCS business back in January, as it deemed the technology essential to “close a gap” in its portfolio, the company told our sister site, Energy-Storage.news. That publication has also explored the role that PCS plays in energy storage system management when reporting from the RE+ trade show in 2022.
The solar inverter market is also hugely competitive, with technological and market competition between the largest Chinese suppliers and Western firms like SMA Solar, SolarEdge and Enphase Energy. The European trade group SolarPower Europe has called inverters the “brains” of the solar array, given the increasingly digitised and granular control that the systems can have over PV plants, and has called for EU measures to support domestic inverter producers.
Back in 2020, ABB sold its solar inverter business to Italian inverter firm FIMER “to focus on other growth segments.” The Gamesa Electric acquisition marks a re-entry into the space.
