About

Us

30 years of ded­i­cat­ed research and devel­op­ment in the solar indus­try lead CTO Henk Old­enkamp and CEO Julian Matthe­is to the foun­da­tion of Solar­na­tive – a young com­pa­ny with a great heritage.

Solarnative Power Stick

It’s all in a stick

At Solar­na­tive, it’s all about the small­est PV micro-invert­er in the world, the Solar­na­tive Pow­er­Stick. Our devel­op­ers head­ed by CTO Henk Old­enkamp, the inven­tor of the micro-invert­er, have man­aged to shrink the required elec­tron­ics to a min­i­mum and fit every­thing inside a small and handy stick. Con­se­quent­ly, this excep­tion­al micro-invert­er fits into open PV rails and even into the frame of a PV module!

Solarnative Power Stick
Henk Character: "We go beyond the edge of what is possible"

Meet Henk, the inventor of the micro-inverter

In 1994, Solar­na­tive CTO of today Henk Old­enkamp suc­cess­ful­ly devel­oped his first mod­el of the micro-invert­er in col­lab­o­ra­tion with NKF, a Dutch cable com­pa­ny, and Shell Solar. After that, Henk’s jour­ney to the real­iza­tion of his dream – an invert­er that could fit into the frame of a mod­ule – was not always an easy one.

But he stuck to his vision and kept going: After 30 years of ded­i­cat­ed devel­op­ment, the Solar­na­tive Pow­er­Stick is not only even to a stan­dard invert­er but has also numer­ous advan­tages over com­pet­ing prod­ucts. And it is a dream come true for Henk, the inven­tor of the micro-inverter.

It is this mind­set of mak­ing the impos­si­ble pos­si­ble, elab­o­rat­ing and push­ing an idea to per­fec­tion, stand­ing up to any obsta­cles that may come, refus­ing to give up, that sets Solar­na­tive apart from its com­peti­tors: We go beyond the edge of what is possible! 

One shared vision: to bring solar energy to the people

In 2018, Henk met Julian at a pho­to­volta­ic con­fer­ence. Both being true „solar natives“, they imme­di­ate­ly got off to a good start, and soon found out that they shared a strong vision: to bring solar ener­gy to the peo­ple. Julian had been work­ing on the solar cell and mod­ule side of the PV val­ue chain, devel­op­ing cur­rent PERC tech­nol­o­gy, build­ing PV fac­to­ries and PV sys­tems, so he was quite famil­iar with the mar­ket require­ments. Hav­ing found­ed and head­ed sev­er­al com­pa­nies in the past, it was clear how to pro­ceed – the idea for Solar­na­tive was born.

Both, Henk and Julian are dri­ven by the desire to bring the ener­gy rev­o­lu­tion into everybody’s home. There­fore, res­i­den­tial PV sys­tems need to be effi­cient, low-cost, safe, and easy to install. As Julian puts it: “We firm­ly believe that Solarnative’s Smart Ener­gy Home with AC-mod­ules is the way to achieve these tar­gets. We are build­ing the future stan­dard for res­i­den­tial PV sys­tems.

Developed and made in Germany

Our R&D: Kassel Lohfelden

Our R&D team is grouped around CTO Henk Old­enkamp and based in Kas­sel Lohfelden. Here we design and refine our prod­ucts based on the lat­est mar­ket demands. From elec­tron­ic and mea­chan­i­cal engi­neer­ing to soft­ware devel­op­ment and cloud archi­tec­ture, our spe­cial­ists con­trant­ly work on improv­ing and extend­ing our portfolio.

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Our production: Hofheim am Taunus

With the open­ing of our fac­to­ry in Hofheim am Taunus in May 2023, we kicked off our in-house pro­duc­tion. Along with a 20 meter long SMT line, numer­ous semi-auto­mat­ed and man­u­al work­sta­tions were set up in our 565 square meter hall space. Around 60 employ­ees do detailed work here in mul­ti-shift oper­a­tion in order to bring up to 100,000 micro-invert­ers “made in Ger­many” to the roofs and bal­conies every month.

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Our offices: Kriftel near Frankfurt

In addi­tion to our devel­op­ment and man­u­fac­tur­ing sites, our back office and ser­vice employ­ees share a new­ly ren­o­vat­ed 400 square meter office space in Krif­tel near Frankfurt.

Look­ing for new chal­lenges? Browse our job open­ings now!

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