Interview: Andres Doebel, Head of EV Charging Europe at Sungrow

Those in clean energy know Sungrow from power electronics. Now the Group has advanced into emobility and is pushing for market share. At the Power2Drive in Munich, we interviewed the new Head of EV Charging Europe, Andres Doebel, to see how integrated solutions may outsmart the competition. 

The portfolio has grown since Sungrow launched a DC charging station in Europe last summer. At the time, the positioning was peculiar. With 30 kW of charging power, the company called the use case “one-hour destination-charging” – with the IDC30E also exhibiting IP65, below 50dB, and ten years lifetime.

However, the charging business is a relatively new field. Coming from power electronics, specifically inverters and solar energy equipment, Sungrow is facing the challenge of “letting the world know that they can also do power electronics for EV chargers,” as Doebel puts it.

He continues: “Another challenge is bringing products from China to Europe; we have a lot of competition from manufacturers with a lot of experience and good quality.” Sungrow’s answer, so Doebel, is to transfer the service and knowledge from its core business to the new segment. “Sungrow customers can expect competitive solutions at the highest quality levels,” so the manager.

Still, the market landscape bears the question, what makes Sungrow better?

“We are more efficient in our R&D,” says Doebel, which makes development “really fast and agile”.

Doebel lists V2X applications becoming “more mature” next year when asked for an outlook. Sungrow was “working on this hot topic,” he added. Sungrow saw this as a challenge early on, and it may be here that the company can play to its strengths. The IDC30E, for example, is smart enough to be load balancing-ready and integrates with PV and battery systems.

In the interview at the Power2Drive show in Munich, Doebel also points to many European countries having weak grids or complex bureaucracies to navigate, “so storage can really help to deploy EV charging way faster” and enables new revenue models for CPOs.

However, the manager says the market is divided mainly into charging on the one hand and energy storage on the other, with both rarely combining intelligently. “Components are needed to work smartly together in the future,” says Doebel before adding: “We want to be the one-stop-shop” for the integrated design of electrification. “So we are talking about the inverters, we are talking about the storage, and we are talking about the EV chargers.”

Watch the video on our LinkedIn channel.

Interview by Carla Westerheide at Power2Drive, Munich.

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