What the scored fleet shows when you total it
These read the whole catalogue rather than one product. Several rebuild from the dataset every time the site publishes, so the figures move when the evidence moves, not when someone remembers to update them.
Three names on a spec sheet. Only one of them is about quality.
BNEF Tier-1, Kiwa PVEL and ITP Renewables get quoted interchangeably in Australian solar marketing as though they all mean the product is good. They measure three different things, one of them is not about the product at all, and one of the programmes has finished. What each is genuinely decisive for.
54% of active benchmark criteria have a direct source link.
A living audit of criterion-level source linkage across 121 active products. It separates catalogue size from evidence depth and shows where the benchmark is strong, moderate, limited or minimal.
13 Australian inverter records clear the buyer-ready gate. 2 do not.
A current Australian inverter comparison of exact-model availability, certification, warranty, grid compatibility, safety notices and criterion-level source coverage. 13 of 15 purchase-priority records currently clear every publication gate.
A battery warranty is a term, a throughput limit and a company standing behind both.
Across 28 active home batteries, the headline warranty term is only one part of the promise. This living comparison tracks duration, throughput, retained capacity, remedy scope and manufacturer backing from the current benchmark.
25 panels promise 25 years or more. 11 cover parts only.
The current benchmark records 25 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.
The blackout test: 21 home batteries judged on one question.
A home battery's overall score does not tell you what happens when the grid fails. This separate, source-backed benchmark isolates outage resilience across 21 systems: backup coverage, switch-over continuity, motor-start evidence and power depth. Powerwall 3 leads the current fleet at 91.6; the median is 72.8.
A global score is not an Australian shopping list.
The global benchmark and a local buying decision answer different questions. In Australia, 87 of 108 exact models have a reviewed market outcome, 64 have recorded availability, and 16 clear the buyer-evidence threshold. This reference separates those layers so an international score is never mistaken for proof of local supply, warranty scope or grid fit.
The sunniest market is not the fastest solar payback.
A frozen 40-market model separates solar resource, generation cost and household payback. Alice Springs leads modelled payback at 2.2 years gross and 1.7 years net, Lhasa has the lowest modelled LCOE, and Cairo shows why high yield alone does not create household value. A wider 64-location leaderboard adds 24 resource-benchmark sites: its overall champion, Calama, carries a soiling caveat the market leaderboard's Alice Springs does not.
Battery rubric v2.3: three structural changes and the evidence behind them.
LMFP and sodium-ion split into separate bands. V2G earns a new 90-point tier. HTW Berlin RSP/SPI becomes the preferred efficiency source. Here is the peer-reviewed evidence behind each decision.
How the hardware behaves after the datasheet
Cell architecture, chemistry, glass, heat, degradation. A datasheet records what a product is certified to do on a test bench. These record what happened to it afterwards.
Two Trina panels both say 515 W. One reaches it on 6% less roof.
The Vertex S+ NEG18R.25 and Australia-exclusive Vertex S+ G3 share a 515 W headline and the same warranty duration. Their area, efficiency, heat response, rear-load rating and evidence depth are not the same.
Six architectures, one recombination chain: how silicon solar cells closed in on their physical ceiling.
Al-BSF, PERC, PERT, TOPCon, HJT, back-contact: each generation didn't invent a new idea so much as chase the same electron loss to a new location in the cell. The chain, the physics ceiling it's closing in on, and a correction we had to make to our own source material before publishing this: even a same-month technical reference had already been overtaken by a newer record.
The chemistry that won wasn't the one that launched the category.
Tesla's original Powerwall ran on NCA. A decade later, LFP owns the residential market almost outright, a national fire crisis rewrote the standards nobody had written yet, and the battery management system quietly became the product's real safety layer. Four patterns from ten years of residential battery history, and what they predict for the next one.
The warranty says 0.25% a year. The desert measured 8.7% in three.
The HJT-versus-TOPCon story is usually told as an architecture race: records, the 2030 mix, the tandem endgame. This is the narrower finding underneath it: independent field and lab data show both n-type families degrading in ways their warranties don't price, and the variable that predicts it is bill-of-materials and manufacturing discipline, not the passivation chemistry the marketing argues about.
The glass beneath the glass: why 'dual glass' stopped describing one thing.
Dual-glass construction genuinely outperforms glass-backsheet on moisture, thermal cycling and cell protection, when it's well executed. But the label now spans everything from SolarWatt's 2mm-plus-2mm POE format with a 26-year field record to cost-reduced 1.6mm EVA-encapsulated modules with no comparable data. Four variables (glass thickness, glass treatment, encapsulant chemistry and edge sealing) decide whether the format delivers over 30 years, and the marketing word for all of them is the same.
The degradation trap: what your battery warranty isn't telling you.
An end-point warranty lets a battery lose most of its usable capacity in years one to five, then stabilise, and the manufacturer still complies. Here's which home batteries actually protect you across the full term.
Two 400 W panels, one hot roof, 14 watts apart: what temperature coefficient predicts that efficiency alone doesn't.
Every module datasheet lists a power rating measured at 25°C. Real cells run 30 to 50°C hotter, and how much power that costs is written into one figure most buyers skip past: temperature coefficient of Pmax. What it measures, why HJT cells respond to heat differently at a physical level, what independent PVEL testing and published field studies show across PERC, TOPCon and HJT, and the checks worth making on your own datasheet before the technology label does the deciding.
Who is standing behind the warranty
A warranty is a promise for 10 to 25 years, and it is only worth the entity behind it. Filings and court records, reported as facts. Where a conclusion is not in the source, it is not drawn here.
Four makers on this benchmark did not stay the same company. Only one of those is an insolvency.
Seven of 122 active scorecards carry a corporate note. Behind them sit four different outcomes: a liquidation, a court-supervised restructuring, a company that left the category while still servicing claims, and a listed manufacturer reporting losses and still trading. A buyer is told to check the warranty. Nobody explains that these four are not the same risk.
The same filing that carries SolarEdge's loss also carries six quarters of margin expansion.
SolarEdge's Q1 2026 result is cited on this site as a corporate-status note, because a 25-year warranty depends on the entity behind it. Read the whole document and it also reports 46% revenue growth, a sixth consecutive quarter of margin expansion, positive operating cash flow, and guidance approaching breakeven. Both readings come from one filing.
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.
One name, three companies: SunPower's long unravelling, and its unlikely survival.
SunPower is no longer one company. It is three: a US installer with no factory, a Singapore manufacturer under judicial management holding the actual IBC patents, and a TCL-owned brand selling outside the US. If you own SunPower- or Maxeon-branded panels, including in Australia, your warranty sits with one specific entity among those three, and working out which one now needs your attention.
The Panasonic EverVolt: fifty years of HJT, and the structural economics that ended them.
Panasonic discontinued EverVolt solar and battery storage in April 2025, ending a heterojunction programme that ran, under two company names, for fifty years. The technology was not the problem: HIT delivered a world-record temperature coefficient and, in 2016, a world-record module efficiency. What ended it was an expired patent moat, two failed strategic pivots, and boutique-scale manufacturing competing against Chinese continental volume. Why review.solar carries a flag on this product, and the warranty position for owners of an installed system.
Where the category is heading, and on whose numbers
Adoption data, published scenarios, and the software layer that increasingly decides what hardware is worth. Every projection here belongs to the body that published it, and is named as theirs.
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.
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.
Mono-silicon's 2030 mix: three scenarios, and six roadmap calls the data already overtook.
TOPCon, back-contact, HJT and tandem's shares of the 2030 module mix are pulled from ITRPV, CPIA, Exawatt and NREL roadmaps, not invented. The catch: those roadmaps keep revising themselves, sometimes within a single year. Why the model runs three scenarios instead of one number, and which 2025-vintage calls are already wrong.
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 electrification shift, projected: three scenarios to 2035.
Not our model. Three named scenario tracks, IEA and BloombergNEF's own Low, Base and High cases, run out to 2035 for EVs, grid storage, solar capacity and electricity demand. The spread is wide (52 to 73% global EV sales share by 2035 depending on which track you believe), and the risk register underneath it, mineral supply, sodium-ion commercialisation, AI demand competing for the same grid capacity, US policy reversal, matters as much as the headline numbers.
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.
The global electrification shift: a decade of cause and consequence, 2015 to 2025.
In 2015 the global EV fleet was 1.2 million cars, grid-scale battery storage barely registered as a category, and solar supplied a rounding error of world electricity. A decade on: one in four new cars sold is electric, storage additions crossed the 100 GW mark in four years (solar took eight, wind fifteen), and battery pack prices fell 93%. What actually caused that, decade by decade, region by region, and why it's the demand context every panel, battery and inverter on this benchmark was built into.