• Last week Huawei is in attendance at the Solar Power Africa 2023 conference held at the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC).
• At the event, Huawei officially launched its smart PV (photovoltaic) solutions designed for a number of local residential scenarios.
• Power-M is already available in South Africa, with Huawei’s Luna and customised end-to-end solution “coming soon”.

Last week the Solar Power Africa 2023 conference took place in Cape Town, with solar energy specialists across the continent in attendance. Also at the event was Huawei as a key partner, with the Chinese company officially launching its smart PV (photovoltaic) solutions for the local residential market.

Huawei has made these solutions available in South Africa in some guise for a little under a year now as part of a soft launch, but this month is planning to make its full breadth of residential solutions available in South Africa.

“The three residential solutions will help users cope with daily challenges such as load-shedding, which are prevalent across the region. Meanwhile, the residential market faces some challenges such as user experiences, mixing manufacturers, quality, service, efficiency and aesthetics,” highlighted Xia Hesheng (pictured below), president of Huawei Digital Power Sub-Saharan Africa Region.

“Huawei is focusing on ‘4T’ Technologies (Watt/Heat/Battery/Bit), this will drive the residential PV scenarios with high quality products that are not only aesthetically pleasing but products that offer high quality system level solutions that integrate digitalisation and intelligence into the PV industry,” he added.

One of its product lineups, Power-M was unveiled last month at the launch of the company’s Mate 50 Pro smartphone, but it will soon be joined by two other offerings under Huawei’s larger FusionSolar banner. The Power-M solution is the most affordable of the FusionSolar solutions, is scalable, and designed to be set up both in freestanding homes or apartments.

Joining the Power-M later this year is the Luna system, which is designed for homes in particular, leveraging the advantages that solar panels offer in terms of generating power.

“With the Huawei smart module controller, the homeowner can maximise the roof installation capacity, resulting in between 10-30% more panels installed. The smart module controller can also significantly increase solar power generation by improving efficiency by 5-30%,” Huawei explained of the system in a press release sent to Hypertext.

“To ensure the safety of installers and roof usage, the module-level shutdown function provides a safer roof voltage. The intelligent battery storage, ESS, can provide 10% more usable energy with the built-in optimiser in each battery module,” added Nick Lusson, VP of Huawei Smart PV Sub-Saharan Africa Region, of the system.

Huawei is also bringing in a fully customised offering, that will feature an entire end-to-end system from the company. This includes, the solar panels, inverters, software, application, and maintenance. These bespoke solutions are designed for larger homes, whose energy requirements may differ from the norm.

It should also be noted that all of the above solutions can be procured via Huawei’s local partners, such as Mustek, ACDC Dynamics, Kathea Energy, and Solar Power (based in Cape Town). That said, you can pick up Power-M from a handful of retailers too.

At the time of writing, no official date or window has been mentioned for Luna and the fully customised solution, but Huawei is working to make those offerings available soon, the company says.