Badri Kothandaraman
Analyst · B. Riley FBR. Your line is now open.
Right, so Ensemble is designed to service two markets, one is grid agnostic market segment and the other is the off-grid market segment. Come to the off-grid market segment where we are on track. We started sampling the product to our lead customer in the fourth quarter of 2018 and we are expecting to ship significant quality to them in the first quarter of 2019. So what I’ll say is this, I mean, if you look at of -- if you look at the countries, where the off-grid technology is going to play a major part is going to be places like India and Africa. India and Africa are places where you will see, of course the PV and storage systems are not going to be that big, they've got to be small. But imagine a hot -- having one or two AC modules or one or two modules with microinverters. And so that will be just perfect for the architecture of a microinverter. It's still too early for us to assess, to talk about volumes and talk about ramps, but we're excited that our product is there, our product is sampling. We have a strong partner and we will talk about in the coming quarters progress. So, that's on the off-grid -- pure off-grid microinverter. On the grid agnostic one it gets more exciting, the grid agnostic one obviously there's a lot of cases. We service somebody, who wants to be completely good independent. We service somebody who wants to be totally dependent on the grid, but just wants backup as a peace of mind. So Ensemble technology that can do whatever the customer wants. That's why, we call it as grid agnostic and Ensemble complex. It has got four components, which is the micro, the battery, the automatic transfer switch, and the combiner and cloud. Having working all of these together seamlessly in terms of hardware and software is something that we have been challenged with. And I think that's why we are experiencing the delay, but the way I think about it is two big opportunities on the Ensemble side is one is the storage, which is Encharge, which takes our revenue per home from $2,000 to $10,000. And the other is even if there is not much storage attachment, what would people want grid agnostic solar or a grid-tied solar. I mean, we think that most people would want a grid-agnostic solar they've given a choice. So once again, we are extremely excited about the technology, we're extremely excited about Ensemble. But we did not want to get ahead of ourselves. Right now we are basically having our heads to the table, we are focused on execution and we are focus on getting this product out in the fourth quarter of 2019.