Goldman Sachs acquires EPC in energy-storage play

Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Cleanhill Partners have acquired a majority stake in EPC Power, a maker of power conversion systems for energy storage and solar PV systems.

Why it matters: Energy-storage deployment is booming, especially for grid-scale systems. New storage incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act will only accelerate this trend.

• The IRA didn't trigger the acquisition, EPC president and CEO Devin Dilley tells Axios. But the incentives will accelerate the company's planned expansion.

What's happening: EPC Power, which has a factory and its HQ in the San Diego area, makes a critical energy-conversion component known as an inverter. The company has sold more than 2 GW of inverters to date.

• Terms of the agreement with Goldman and Cleanhill, a private equity firm, were not disclosed.
• EPC is opening a second factory on the East Coast later this year. It runs an engineering and sales office in Helsinki that will serve the European market.

Catch up fast: Inverters are a linchpin of the energy transition, helping regulate energy generation and storage, particularly at grid-scale.

• They convert the DC power that's stored in batteries or generated by solar panels into the AC power that's used by the grid.

State of play: Energy storage is booming, in turn driving demand for inverters.

• New installations last quarter more than doubled from 2021 to 2,608 MWh, a Q2 record, according to Wood Mackenzie.

The bottom line: "As inverters get more and more penetration on the grid, they will become the dominant controlling feature of the grid," Dilley tells Axios.