Good morning, and thank you for joining us on today's call to discuss Enphase Energy's business. With us today is Badri Kothandaraman, Enphase's President and Chief Executive Officer. After he has completed the presentation, we will take written questions. To submit a question, please use the Q&A tab at the top of the team to ask. We've turned off your microphones, and we'll only be taking written questions. We will try to respond to as many questions as possible. Please note that management may be making forward-looking statements about the company's current plans and expectations with respect to its business, technology, and products. Actual results may differ materially from current plans and expectations, so I encourage you to read our SEC filing, where we discuss the risks inherent to our business.
You will find detailed discussions in our filings with the SEC, including our annual report on Form 10-K for fiscal year 2025 and our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31st, 2026. Please note that non-GAAP financial measures referenced during this presentation are reconciled to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measures found in the investor presentation posted on our website at investor.enphase.com. With that, I will turn the call over to Enphase Energy's President and Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Badri Kothandaraman, to give a short report on the company.
Good morning. Quick overview of the company's usual. Founded in 2006. Approximately 2,700 employees. I'm talking to you from Fremont, California. That's our headquarters. Our customers are distributors, installers, homeowners, as well as business owners. We have shipped approximately 87.8 million microinverters cumulative, big numbers. Over 5 million systems in more than 165 countries. We are rapidly making progress in storage. We have shipped over 2.5 GW hours of storage. 2025 revenue was approximately $1.5 billion. We are profitable. Let's go to the next page. Brief recap here. Core differentiation is a semiconductor integration. You see the zoom there on the left, and that's our ASIC. That's our chip. That's our silicon, custom silicon.
We continue to innovate on that silicon. IQ9 uses silicon, our Swift column. You know, that was the same in IQ8 as well. Going forward for the next generation, we are working on a custom silicon called Kestrel, and that will also be used in our Solid-State Transformer. A lot of innovation happening on the custom silicon. That's the brain. That helps us to do predictive control, which keeps the architecture to a single stage in converting DC to AC and vice versa. A software-defined architecture. Most of the issues that arise, be it a quality issue, customer issue, we will be able to usually take care of it with software. Our product is incredibly flexible.
It is one hardware and software-defined according to the country of operation. Ensemble is our energy management technology. Basically, it is the architecture on how an AC coupled system works and how it interacts, you know, how each component interacts with the other. The general concept is it's a distributed architecture, AC coupled, and that's the AC bus that you see on the right. Everything we do, for example, microinverters are in the, you know, convert DC from solar into AC for the home. Storage basically takes the AC, then you have microinverters inside storage, stores it as DC. I get an EV charger, for example, bidirectional EV charger that taps into the DC port of the car.
There are inverters, grid forming inverters that, you know, once again, DC converted into AC, and so on. AC coupled architecture. It's modular. It helps us to extend the architecture. Regardless of when a customer bought the system, he should be able to upgrade the system with our latest and greatest products. Next. That's the benefits of what I talked about, semiconductor technology, software, and our Ensemble is higher quality. I told you about the single stage possible because of our custom silicon, and that means fewer components, reduced heat on the batteries. No high voltage DC. We operate at low voltage DC. LFP, very safe chemistry. We believed in LFP right from the get-go.
We haven't changed it. The industry has also adopted LFP now. I talked about the flexibility. Efficiency is high once again because we have single stage architecture. Supply chain, quality, efficiency, cost, all of them are interrelated and all points towards our, you know, semiconductor technology with the ASIC. Okay, next slide. Again, our quality targets have not changed. 500 defects, you know, defective parts per million. That means it's a 0.05% number. We continue to do well there. Margins. Our gross margins are quite good. We are in the mid-40s. It is possible because of two things. One is value-based pricing. The other is working on world-class costs. We continue to do that well.
We established a team when I joined the company in 2017. That team is growing from strength to strength. Our customer service is also one of the strongest points. Worldwide NPS has climbed from the 70s into the 80s, which is good. We are taking it to the next level. We are introducing an AI assistant in the homeowner app. 100,000 homeowners have that today already. We are planning to extend it across the fleet very soon. That can do some pretty amazing things. Similar AI assistant for the installers also is coming, where the installers will be able to get a very quick snapshot of everything in their fleet, and they will be able to identify issues, and it'll help them to zoom on to the right issues. Cost of course.
Cost, like what I said, cost very closely related to our architecture, to the semiconductor architecture, to the ASIC. They are all interpointing together. The architecture dictates, you know, the components because in single stage means less number of components that we have. Semiconductors are miniaturized now, so we take advantage of Moore's Law. We focus on both digital integration, which I talked about ASIC, as well as analog integration too. We can integrate a bunch of things into high volume, low cost semiconductors. Next. The business models have not changed. It's a efficient manufacturing footprint. OpEx, most of our engineering development is in India, along with, you know, New Zealand is our It's still our key place where we do brand new microinverter architectures. Next.
The supply chain, not much has changed. We are predominantly making most of our microinverters, I would say greater than 95% of our microinverters in the U.S. Basically, we get production tax credits there, which is good. We also make at least, I would say 50%, maybe 40% of our battery volumes in the U.S. too, and that is increasing. Globalization is important for us and we are slowly but surely diversifying away from China on batteries. Next. This is a big deal. This is what we do. We, you know, contrary to other companies that have to do extra things for ESG is what we do. We ship microinverters that basically prevent CO2. These are the statistics over time.
Big one to note is 137 TWh of clean energy production over time. Next. This is important. I'm going to slowly walk you through this. Build best-in-class distributed energy systems and deliver them to homes and business through our installer and distribution partners, enabled by a comprehensive platform. We are getting more into commercial, that's why business is there. Distributed energy system. I talked about Ensemble, which is a distributor architecture. Installer and distribution partners are very important for us. Our business is through our installers, therefore, a lot of our decisions are based upon ease of doing business for distributors, installers, and ultimately the homeowner. Which is why the installer platform is very critical for us.
How to ensure that we're easy to do business with, and how to ensure that installers can get their job done with not only with the products, but also with tools and software. Okay, next. Actually, go back to that page. I'd like to point out the picture there. That's our fourth generation system there. The one on the left is the IQ Meter Collar. The IQ Meter Collar we introduced it last year, June timeframe to the market. It is now qualified in 64 utilities across the country. Qualified in all the major utilities in California. That basically makes backup very, very easy.
We expect this to help our business considerably as we roll this out more to more utilities across the nation. Brief recap on what does the Enphase Energy system contain. We started with microinverters. You see on the roof, you have microinverters. That's how the company started. The basic building block for us is still the microinverter. The semiconductor-based, software-defined microinverter. You see microinverters there, and then you see the battery there. I talked about the Meter Collar. You have an EV charger there that is now becoming bi-directional. The Enphase App. Yeah. System is slowly growing. Solar, batteries, EV chargers, home energy management. Next. This is the one I was telling here, the more clearer picture.
The left is the meter collar and the right, the rightmost boxes are 10 kWh battery, which is our fourth-generation battery. It's more compact than our third-generation. We started shipping this from June last year. Next. This one, IQ9. IQ9 is our ninth-generation grid-forming microinverter based on GaN technology. As the power becomes higher and higher, silicon has got some limitations. GaN can handle a lot more power. We started shipping commercial microinverters based on GaN for 27 W in December. Till now, Enphase did not have a three-phase, 480 V product in the U.S., that has changed in the last six months.
We have started shipping, and we have also started shipping the, in select places, the IQ9 N residential microinverters as well. That's gonna become more mainstream in this quarter. Today we announced that we were taking pre-orders on a product which is IQ9 S-3P, 480 V. The 480 V is line to line. It's written 277, that is line to neutral. Why is IQ9 S important? This product that we are seeing here, IQ9 N, is for 27 W, IQ9 S is 548 W. In the commercial business, the panels are now quite high wattage. The panels can go anywhere from 600 W to 650 W.
When you have 650 watts DC, commercial panel, you need the correct microinverter to be paired with it. One obvious was to make a 548 W, and that was easy to make with our GaN platform. Of course, this is made in the U.S., which is important for the commercial system owners, and it meets, it is FIPS compliant. Okay, next. Just a recap of batteries. We entered the battery business. Originally, we entered it in a very small way in 2016. We introduced what we call it first generation batteries in Australia. That was a very small battery, a kilowatt hour. Then we really started getting into the battery business in 2020.
The batteries that you see on the left are the ones we shipped at that time. 3 kWh , 3.3 kWh building blocks. The 10 kWh battery would be 3 kWh of the 3.3 kWh . The one on the right-hand side is our third generation product, and that is being used a lot by Europe. Europe uses the flex space version of the third generation because it is, you know, everything is three-phase there. Three-phase backup is important. Again, the third generation has got substantially higher power than it's got double the power of the first and second generation. Next. I talked about the 4th-generation product. We introduced it in June.
The main event here is the Meter Collar and of course the compactness of the battery, 62% less of wall space compared to our 3rd-generation. Now we are working on our 5th- generation. We expect to pilot the battery there. That will be even more smaller, even more cost-effective. It uses 100 Ah prismatic cells, and the form factor is quite amazing. We will be able to have a stack of 30 kWh, which means to the end consumer, it will appear as one box on the wall. Okay, next. The PowerMatch technology. This is also an interesting feature. Basically, what this means is, you can see on the right That's a 3rd-generation battery. It's got six microinverters in it.
You know, when the home is consuming less watts, for example, 500 W. Which is typical for the most part, 80%-85% of the time, the home consumes less, you know, nominal power, 500 W. All of the inverters in the battery do not need to be on. That's the advantage of an architecture where it is distributed architecture, which means you have I have six of these microinverters, 640 W each. In the case I just now described, I mean, I would have 5 of them in standby. I would only have one microinverter active. What's the advantage of that? All inverters, they need current, meaning they burn current to operate.
That's called as the tear loss, which is inherently, they need, you know, circuitry in them to be active. That consumes current. By putting them into standby mode, we can eliminate that. We can exactly tailor these micro inverters according to the load. While that is not exactly possible if you have one monolithic string inverter. If you have one monolithic string inverter, if your consumption is 500 W, that string inverter is still active. This is a big deal. It helps you to save kilowatt hours and stored energy, for example, can last up to 40% longer than competition. That's available now with the over-the-air software upgrade for both our third generation and fourth generation, and it will be default for us going forward. Next.
This is a new one. This is an IQ Battery commercial battery. As how we got into the three-phase solar business in the U.S., this will complement solar business. Because, you know, batteries are getting popular, they save money, basically self-consumption, they provide backup. There is demand charges, batteries are getting very popular for commercial. This is for the small commercial business. We are talking about schools, hospitals, gas stations, small businesses, many more applications there. It's a 80 kWh. This is an 80 kWh cabinet that you see, 25 of these can be strung together in a site, giving up to 2 MWh.
It is, you know, it supports two hour and four hour configuration, which means that 40 kW of continuous power for a two hour configuration. You know, once again, uses exactly our principles, which is distributed architecture. Uses 314 Ah prismatic cells, a 15-year warranty. This is again taking it to a next level here. This we expect to pilot this product in Q1 2027. Next. EV charger. We've introduced the EV charger into Europe and a few months ago, we introduced into the U.S. This is a beautiful product. It is a completely redesigned product. It's got a lot of bells and whistles.
Screen charging, supports dynamic phase switching, dynamic load balancing, which is, you know, dynamic load balancing is quite simple, which is, let's say your, you have a fixed main panel rating at home. Let us say that is 100 A. You've turned on your charger. The charger is charging at its maximum current. Suddenly you turn something else on in the home that consumes a lot of current. The charger is capable of throttling down itself in order for you to still meet your 100 A so that your breaker doesn't trip. Once again, very smart. A lot of other, you know, features here. Seamless integration into Enphase's ecosystem to help homeowners maximize savings. This is starting to ramp nicely in both Europe as well as America.
Next. Based on that charger architecture, this is a bidirectional charger. What is a bidirectional charger? The charger on the previous page does not have any active circuitry in it. This one, this bidirectional charger, has got grid-forming microinverters inside the charger. What does it do? This charger taps into the DC port of the car and converts energy from the car into the home. DC from the car into AC for the home. Can do V2H, which is vehicle to home, which means providing backup for the home as well as vehicle to grid, can participate in grid services. You can see here again, the architecture is very simple. IQ Meter Collar that we already have. It is actually hidden behind the meter. Then one bidirectional EV charger. You can only start with this.
You don't need solar. This will give you vehicle to home. Of course, solar would be the right economic choice because you need to pay for the charging, so solar would be a good economic choice. This can work. You know, you can have a solar system and you can have a bi-di EV charger. That will work too. You can have a solar home battery as well as a bidirectional EV charger with a car battery. It's extremely flexible, and we expect to start shipping this product in Q4. Okay, next. Energy management. This is energy management, more popular in Europe than the U.S. Customers have things like third-party EV chargers, heat pumps, hot water heaters.
We are able to, basically, you know, with the IQ Energy Router, we are able to take all of those and then interface it with our home energy management system, so that customer only has got one app to work with. We have a nice feature called AI-based optimization, so customer doesn't need to bother on, you know, how to extract maximum efficiency, how to extract full self-consumption out of his setup. This will be done automatically for him. Next. Installer platform. I'll just briefly touch upon this. This Solargraf is our installer platform, and it consists of, you know, lead management, design and proposal, working with various financing companies. Generation of automated permit plan sets. Of course, we have our installation and commissioning software, plus O&M. We do O&M with Enphase Care.
Enphase Care is getting slowly popular among our fleet. Next. Let me cover AI and Enphase. Enphase is offering now IQ SST. SST stands for Solid-State Transformer. Let's go to the next page. We announced this a couple of weeks ago. This product is for AI data centers. There are three constraints emerging here. Demand is growing much faster than the AI dedicated capacity and the power infrastructure. That's one. AI loads can swing from idle to full power several times per second, stressing the grid. The legacy architectures today have too many conversion stages between grid and compute. All of these three things need to be addressed because the rack power is slowly increasing.
Today, it's of the order of 100 kW, that is increasing to a megawatt soon, in a couple of years. Whatever architecture that is present today will not work in the future. Next. This talks about the demand-supply gap. Next. Just a quick background, why we think we are entitled to play in this area is that what we are talking about is power electronics. That's what we have experience in. We have shipped nine generations of microinverters. We have shipped, this is what we do for a living. 87.8 million microinverters, 5 million systems, a lot of things I already talked about. We think our architecture is perfect for addressing the challenges with the data centers. Next.
This is our IQ Solid-State Transformer. This is a 1.25 MW building block. It is a super cluster of 342 power modules. Each power module is approximately, you can think about it as approximately 4 kW. We will support 35 kV and 15 kV class, which means What's the definition? I mean, what does a Solid-State Transformer do? Takes medium voltage AC and converts it into 800 V DC. Medium voltage AC is the 35 kV class, 35,000 V class and 15,000 V. That's medium voltage AC. What's called low voltage in the industry is actually may not seem low voltage to us, but that's the terminology. That's 800 V DC.
The 800 V DC is directly going to go into the AI rack, and then you're going to have that 800 V DC further stepped down to approximately 1 V, which is where the NVIDIA chips operate. The architecture is going to get substantially simplified. There are several power conversion stages in between today. Today's architecture is not an 800 V DC, it is approximately 50 V DC. NVIDIA introduced this 800 V DC architecture. The entire industry is working to support that ecosystem. What we are going to be doing is to introduce an SST volume shipments in 2028, plan pilots in 2027.
There may be something like four SSTs per skid, which is the last comment, which is 5 MW per skid. You know, once again, each SST is 1.25 MW. First bullet. You see in the picture there are 342 power modules there. Next. That's the building block. That's the power module. Four KVA power module, you know, distributed architecture. Single-stage power conversion because of the ASIC advantage I talked about. That's the custom Kestrel ASIC. GaN. GaN provides us with, you know, switching efficiency and high power. 98.5% peak efficiency. Brand new transformer design. Probably the biggest complexity is in the transformer design because now we are talking about going from 35 kV class to 800 V DC.
Soft switching design. Because we operate at the microinverter scale, we have a soft switching design, low EMI, plastic enclosure. We can target microinverter class reliability. There's also built-in redundancy into the product because the availability we need to cater to the data centers is five nines, 99.999%. That requires us to have clever redundancy, which is what the distributed architecture automatically gives. Next. Heart of the power module. It's not anything different from what we have today. Kestrel ASIC. 5th-gen custom 22 nm custom silicon powering the single-stage converter. Multi-core software. Built-in communication, security, and safety. Tandem function. We have two sections in the power module. One is a medium voltage, you know, that's tens of thousands of volts.
The other is low voltage. There is now a fiber optic interface between the two for communication there. GaN BDS. BDS is a bidirectional switch that helps us to go from four silicon FETs to two bidirectional switch for our IQ9 microinverters. This enables compact, very high efficiency power conversion and of course, supports fast switching, which is not easy to do when you start switching at, you know, with silicon carbide, for example. Next. Why do we believe we have an advantage? Because our response time, because we are single-stage, our response time is very good. Sub-millisecond response. Because the sub-millisecond response is good, there is potential for us to reduce or eliminate the sidecar infrastructure. Sidecar infrastructure has got the BBU battery backup units and capacitor backup units as well.
We might need a little bit of the CBU, but the BBU is can be potentially eliminated. There is more work to be done there, obviously. Five nines availability, I talked about it. Lower field service cost is a whole point, is to have built-in redundancy. It is easy, meaning field service will not be necessary. If field service were necessary, hot swap is possible. U.S. supply chain. One of the problems is that the transformer supply chain is completely full now. This is the traditional transformer supply chain, and that is completely full. What we are doing is now a semiconductor-based, software-defined, you know, supply chain. That's what we bring in, we have experience doing that till now.
It will no longer rely on the traditional transformer supply chain. We can do all of this in the U.S. It's high volume. It's, you know, needs a high volume components available and semiconductors, and we know how to do it here in the U.S. Next. Quick overview on the financials. Basically, you can see, you know, 2020-2025 was not bad. We grew from 2024 a bit there. 2026 is interesting because, you know, what we just went through Q1 2026 was the first quarter where the 25D tax credit was eliminated for, you know, cash and loan business.
Obviously that's, that was not a desired result but, you know, we have to look forward, not look back. The industry is adjusting. We have our plans there. You heard a robust introduction of new product pipeline. You saw the expansion into commercial. You saw the foray into data centers. In addition, we are working with a few partners on prepaid leases. This prepaid lease helps us to restore the 25D customer, meaning the cash and loan customer base. It helps us to bring that back. We are excited about that product, the prepaid lease product, and we expect that to start ramping through the year.
You can see the healthy thing here is, regardless of the macro, we continue to make money and we continue to generate positive free cash flow. Okay, next. Conclusion. We are proud of our tech, 550 patents and pending applications. Now, we not only have products for residential, we are branching aggressively into commercial and data centers. The SAM served available market is $19 billion as of today, that is gonna expand when we introduce the product for the data centers, that is gonna expand significantly. When we introduce product for the small commercial batteries early next year, that SAM is going to expand. The bi-directional charger, when we introduce that SAM is also going to expand to that of electric vehicles. That is a massive market.
That's it. Okay. Thank you.
We will now address appropriate questions submitted by our stockholders. As a reminder, to submit a question, please use the Q&A tab at the top of the Teams app. We've turned off your microphones, and we'll only be taking written questions, and we'll try to respond to as many questions as possible.
I do see a question here. Any planned demo in 2026 for SST U.S. AI data centers? In 2026, our internal plans are to get a full system demo first internally, and then we expect to be doing pilots in 2027.
Any questions?
I have a question. Badri, if you could tell us a little bit what's the dynamics of the worldwide markets. Where do you see most opportunities, U.S. versus Europe battery area?
Yeah.
Give us a perspective from this point of view.
Right. U.S., again, is an attractive market for us. In U.S., the dynamics are, the dynamics have changed in the last few years. Originally, you know, solar was the thing to do. Net metering drove that a lot. The economics were good. All of a sudden, solar becomes not very sustainable because of the duck curve. You find in the U.S., although most of the states are still solar, you are slowly but surely seeing them all gravitate towards solar plus storage. Net metering is getting replaced with a form of net metering. Example, California, where, you know, there is not much of export in incentives. Every state, my prediction is every state, sooner or later in the next, you know, 10 years, will become solar plus storage.
I think we are well-positioned there. The systems that will win are systems that can effectively integrate solar batteries, things like the bi-directional EV chargers and do proper energy management. That's my perspective there. I'm talking mainly about the solar plus battery business, not yet talking about data centers. Coming to Europe. Europe is actually a little bit ahead of the U.S. In Europe, many countries have already recognized that, you know, recognized the value of self-consumption. Many countries have something called as a feed-in tariff, which is really another way to say that your export incentive is gradually reducing. Some countries have the export tariff close to zero. Like for example, France. Two or three years back, France had an export incentive.
Now that export incentive is approximately zero, which is like EUR 0.04 per kilowatt hour. It's very, very less. Germany moved to solar plus storage. Netherlands is now moving to solar plus storage because they are considering to eliminate net metering. France is doing its own thing. They are also going to solar plus storage. Every country is going in that direction, and that will happen much sooner. In the U.S., you know, I said 10 years, but in Europe it's already there for the most part. Therefore, what people are looking for there, Europe consumers are quite cost sensitive. They are looking for us to give them cost-effective solutions on solar batteries. Bi-di, you know, bi-directional EV chargers, we believe will take off in Europe as well.
You know, the key is to make sure the system, it's a full system, all-in-one system and available for them at low system price. You know, in Europe, today, if you ask me, I have to be candid about it. There is a lot of Chinese product in Europe. What happened was when the Ukraine crisis happened, at that time, the demand skyrocketed. At that time, everyone realized that supply was a massive problem. The Chinese suppliers recognized this first, and they started ramping up their presence in Europe ever since then. You know, these are not bad products. They do service the customers decently, but they are point products.
Point products means it is not a full solution, but it is, let us say, a battery. Where Enphase can win is if we not only help in overall system cost reduction, but if we offer a comprehensive energy management, you know, solution, an all-in-one solution that comprises of solar, batteries, bidirectional chargers, normal EV chargers, heat pumps, hot water heaters, everything around, you know, doing home energy management. That, you know, that will be a lot more value added to the consumer. What we are doing on our new products, the 5th- generation battery, for example, will eliminate the illusion that Enphase products are, or Enphase batteries are high priced.
This one will, you know, it'll not only It is going to be cost-effective volume-wise, and it uses 100 A of prismatic cells, so it's very compact. The energy density is actually 50% higher than our 4th-generation battery, which means that, you know, the size, the cost, the functionality is going to be always an AC-coupled functionality. PowerMatch, I talked about. PowerMatch, we are able to do PowerMatch because we have microinverters in there. We are able to shut them off. We are able to do a lot of innovation there to add value. That's what I see. I see demand going up for solar and batteries. I see us innovating there with IQ9 on the solar side. Soon, IQ10.
5th-generation battery with our commercial battery, with the bi-di product. The last one is last but not least, the data center opportunity is huge for us. The data center opportunity, once again, it solves a real problem for the data centers, simplifying power conversion. The power conversion is simplified now. Instead of having multiple stages, from medium voltage AC, you now have one Solid-State Transformer there. It uses not a brand new architecture, it uses the architecture that we have tried and tested for years. Thanks, Sarb. Sarb. When will Okay, Start at the bottom. You wanna start at the bottom? Yeah. There is an uphill in terms of market penetration regarding SST with many data centers already.
How do you plan to penetrate, and what effort are you currently doing? Like what I talked about, you know, SST, I mean, brand new segment. There are a few startup players, there are a few established players, and I believe everyone is approaching it with the conventional, with the conventional architecture. Our architecture is so unique that if you ask me, "What, what do you think the differentiation is?" The differentiation for us is going to be our fast response time. Our fast response time coupled with the distributed architecture providing the service level with high efficiency is something unique to microinverter architecture, and we expect to be highly differentiated from that perspective.
You know, having said that, it is still early days there is still some ways for us to go, in order to, you know, going from prototypes to real full systems, to actual pilots running for months and showing the concept of sidecar optimization. We do have some work ahead of us. When will bidirectional charger pre-order start for delivery in Q4 2026? What is the price? We will let you know about the price, we expect the pre-orders to begin in Q3. Given the critical importance of GaN, is there any constraint how much of the substrate comes from China? There is not any constraint right now. Our suppliers, all don't have, you know, any concerns there.
We are Okay, vis-a-vis SolarEdge, how significant is the made in U.S.A. labor to gain further market share on SolarEdge, for that matter, elsewhere in the world? The made in U.S.A. is important for us on couple of things. One is, the domestic content is critical for the third-party TPO suppliers. Products with domestic content enable the third-party TPO players, third-party owners to get to get their ITC. To get ITC tax credit. You get your base ITC, if you have domestic content, you can get 10% additional. That is a requirement. In addition, what got created by the Biden administration was the IRA, that provides manufacturing incentives for companies in the U.S.
One such incentive is a production tax credit. In order for us to produce inverters in the U.S., we do get production tax. We get production tax credit there. Those are the reasons to do it in the U.S. Is it significant in terms of installers like it? Yes, some installers who actually, who are actually, you know, in favor of made in, you know, made in U.S.A., they're able to sell that well. Competition, expect our competition to also catch up. Yes. Do you have plans to offer step-up transformers for the commercial and utility scale solar technology platform, specifically dedicated pad-mounted substation transformers that go from inverter output voltages to medium voltage for grid interconnection? No.
If you look at it, what we are trying to do here, and one possible application of the SST, which I haven't yet focused on, but I don't mind sharing, is if you have a utility scale solar, for example. The utility scale solar, the panel DC voltage is approximately 15. Meaning panels are strung together, and you have 1,500 V DC. Imagine that 1,500 V DC directly going to medium voltages. You do not need a low voltage AC inverter. You can directly go to medium voltage AC to the grid. Utility scale solar can benefit a lot through the SST architecture. You don't need the conventional transformer. Similarly, you look at your DC fast charging. DC fast charging.
If you see, medium voltage comes in, and then there is a custom transformer, and then you have low voltage AC, and then you build a DC charger. That is not required. You can directly go from medium voltage AC to low voltage DC with one stage SST, single stage conversion from medium voltage AC to low voltage DC. You can create all of a sudden a fast DC charger, reducing the number of stages. SST has got a number of applications. Right now we are leveraging the first one for the data centers, which will reduce the number of power conversion stages, which will directly take medium voltage AC into the compute rack with 800 V. Is there any plans to reduce microinverter prices to tackle Europe?
Yes, we already did late last year in December. Around November, December timeframe, we did reduce our microinverter prices in Europe by 20%. We also reduced earlier this year. We reduced the microinverter prices in the U.S. as well by approximately 20% too. I think 15%-20% in Q1. We have also adjusted pricing on batteries. We adjusted pricing on batteries in the U.S. in March approximately by 10%-12%. We adjusted pricing on batteries in Europe just now in the last week. I said that in the earnings call. We adjusted pricing by another 10% in Europe. We are able to do that because our cost structure is getting better.
Also, with this, with the reversal of the tariff ruling, the IEEPA, we no longer have to pay a lot of tariff. We were able to get approximately improvement of 2% of gross margin there. We thought that this would be a good investment for us to basically reduce the prices there. That will be aligned to our 5th-generation battery, which is coming very soon. That's where we are.
Okay. That was the last question. Thank you again for your attendance today and for your continued support of Enphase Energy.
Thank you. We're good. Again, yep. Thank you.