SMA and the plant control a constrained connection needs

We will not gloss over it. SMA reported FY2025 revenue roughly flat at about EUR 1.52bn with a widened net loss of about EUR 181m, against about EUR 118m in 2024. EBITDA before one-time items stayed positive at about EUR 107m, but including one-time items it fell to about minus EUR 65m on inventory write-downs, provisions and restructuring charges, and the company is running a multi-year transformation programme with one-time charges of roughly EUR 170m to 220m and announced job cuts.

The mitigant we state alongside it: the division this page concerns, Large Scale and Project Solutions, grew its revenue in 2025 and is the healthier part of the business, and SMA remains a long-established German manufacturer. Before we specify it we confirm in writing how the warranty is backed and how UK support and spares are arranged. If a more settled maker suits your roof just as well, we will say so.

It addresses the same problem from a different place. ShadeFix runs in the inverter and repeatedly sweeps for the true global maximum power point on each string, so a shaded run is worked around rather than allowed to sit at a false local peak. There is no electronics on the module and nothing extra on the roof to fail or to be replaced at height.

The trade-off is granularity. Module-level electronics can recover more where shading is severe and highly localised, such as a dense forest of vent stacks, and they give per-module monitoring that string-level optimisation cannot. Where the shading is that bad we would look at an architecture built around it instead. On the more common commercial case, a few hours of edge shading on part of a large roof, ShadeFix does the job without adding several hundred devices to the maintenance schedule.

The free-standing Sunny Tripower range leads: the 50 kW CORE1 with six MPP trackers across twelve string inputs, and the 125 kW Sunny Tripower 125 with twelve trackers across twenty-four string inputs for large multi-pitch roofs. For uniform ground-mount we step to the Sunny Highpower PEAK3, the 150 kW SHP 150-20 on a 1500 V architecture or the 100 kW SHP 100-20 at 1000 V, both single-tracker designs picked by site DC voltage. Utility plants use Sunny Central stations with the SMA Power Plant Controller. The exact model and count come out of the PV*SOL design for your site rather than a catalogue line.

It handles the grid-side conditions the network operator imposes. The Data Manager gives centralised commissioning and monitoring across the inverter fleet; the Power Plant Controller adds active and reactive power control, export limitation and grid-code compliance across Sunny Highpower and Sunny Central plants. Where the connection carries a firm export limit, dynamic export control holds the agreed limit without curtailing what the building itself is using, and the settings are documented so the constraint can be audited later. That depth is the main reason we reach for SMA on a large connection rather than a simpler string platform.

We do not publish an inverter price, and a per-unit figure would mislead you anyway. What moves the number on an SMA scheme is the tracker count you actually need, whether the design lands on a free-standing Sunny Tripower or a single-tracker Sunny Highpower, whether the plant-control layer is required by the connection conditions, and which warranty extension is bought. Those are design outputs. We model the array in PV*SOL from the survey, specify the inverter that fits, and price the installed system with the model and the warranty term named.