Just as fuel consumption is a consideration when buying a car, as a solar system owner, you should choose your solar inverter based on low energy consumption and high efficiency. The efficiency indicates the percentage of the available solar power that is actually convertered and fed into the utility grid. Modern inverters currently consume between 4 and 8 % of the converted energy in the conversion process, which corresponds to an overall efficiency of 92 to 96 %.

Further reducing this already low energy consumption is a major technical challenge, and one which can only be achieved with new and innovative designs. The development team at SMA succeeded in this thanks to a completely new circuit design for the inverter bridge – the H5 topology – and have managed to optimize the power output to the utility grid in such a way that significantly fewer losses occur and for the first time, an efficiency of over 98 % has been obtained.