The Signals Desk carries the recurring market-signal notes: indicator movements, "what changed this month," and data pulses grounded in the benchmark. Where a Signals piece argues an interpretation, that byline sits with Dietreich Farquharson; where it reports what the data showed without building a personal case, it sits here.
Published under this byline
27 panels promise 25 years or more. 11 cover parts only.
The current benchmark records 27 active panels with product warranties of at least 25 years. 11 cover parts only; this living comparison separates duration, service, transport, evidence quality and manufacturer backing.
A metering accessory is where a vendor's market intent shows up first.
Sigenergy's Sigen Power Sensor has moved to a new -WI generation. The published installation guide adds 2.4 GHz WLAN alongside RS485, widens the operating range, and carries RCM certification with Australian demand-response pin assignments, where the two prior published datasheets listed European standards only.
A vehicle compatibility list is not a manufacturer certification.
Sigenergy publishes V2X field-test results for 204 vehicle records across 44 brands, and states on the same page that no vehicle manufacturer has certified, endorsed or authorised any of them. The gap between a charger vendor's compatibility list and a carmaker's supported feature is the whole buying decision, and it is documented in the vendor's own footnotes.
SolarEdge's financial record through Q1 2026: the context behind a 25-year warranty.
SolarEdge entered 2026 as a company that had stopped collapsing and had not yet recovered. Two years of heavy net losses, a roughly 30% headcount reduction, the closure of its storage division and a large secured exposure to a customer now in Chapter 11 sit alongside a return to positive gross margin, positive operating cash flow and year-on-year revenue growth. This is the sourced record, not a forecast. The judgement is the reader's.
Home battery storage's breakout year: the 2025 data, and what Australia just proved.
Global energy storage additions crossed 100 GW for the first time. Battery pack prices hit a record low, with stationary storage now the cheapest segment there is. And in under a year, Australia's Cheaper Home Batteries Program installed more residential capacity than the country had built in its entire history before it. The data behind 2025, and the subsidy-design lesson inside it.
The inverter decade, in the figures that survive a source check.
The story of the solar inverter growing from a passive DC-AC converter into the grid's control layer is real, but a lot of the numbers attached to it aren't. Here's the decade rebuilt on primary sources only: the market concentration that's documented, the power-electronics shift that's measured, and three widely-quoted figures we checked, couldn't source, and left on the floor.
The hardware is commoditised. The software that runs it can't prove its claims.
Inverters, batteries and EV chargers have converged on similar efficiencies and price bands. The value has moved above the hardware, to the control layer, the home energy management software that dispatches these assets against tariffs and grid signals. An independent audit of 51 products found a third claim the top capability tier and only one in eight can demonstrate it. Where dispatch logic is weak, high-efficiency hardware delivers little.