News

OutBack Power and HiQ Solar Expand 3-Phase String Inverter Partnership

June 28, 2018 by Paul Shepard

OutBack Power announced today an expanded partnership with HiQ Solar. Since 2016 the companies have partnered to bring HiQ's innovative "plug and play" TrueString 3-phase commercial solar inverters to the market, with OutBack selling the HiQ technology under the ProHarvest by OutBack Power brand.

Recently, the two companies agreed to expand the relationship in order to better serve current HiQ and ProHarvest customers, establish new markets and develop next generation products. Moving forward, all installer sales, EPC sales, and technical support activities will be managed by OutBack under the ProHarvest brand. HiQ Solar will focus on engineering and R&D efforts.

"The ProHarvest brand has been well received in the markets that OutBack serves which is why we are excited with the new structure of the expanded partnership," said Brandon Provalenko, OutBack's vice president of commercial operations.

"This move allows us to leverage our sales and technical support expertise and introduce ProHarvest to a new set of customers while expanding the OutBack product line in a way that aligns with our strategy of providing a world-class customer experience,” added Provalenko.

"Over the past nine years HiQ has grown past the start-up stage and now has found a great partner to take us to the next level. Our goal is to get our technology into the hands of as many customers as possible, both in solar and solar plus storage," said Rob Howard, HiQ Solar's CEO.

Once dominated by large, but inflexible, central inverters, the trend today is to use many string inverters which are easier to install and provide system redundancy that protects against full system failure caused by failure of a single component.

ProHarvest inverters combine the best of all worlds; economics of a large string inverter, with the array-mounting and form-factor of a microinverter.  With this technology, installers have a "plug and play" system architecture to work with.

The ProHarvest line includes a 480-Volt and 208-Volt string inverters, ac splice box and communications gateway.