Powering Brighter Places With Enphase Energy

Clean energy systems face a basic timing challenge: The sun doesn’t always shine when demand is highest. Solar production can peak at midday, while energy use often rises in the evening. As utilities work to integrate more renewables, matching supply with demand becomes increasingly important to ensure reliable, affordable power.

The answer to this imbalance may already be on your home and in your driveway — energy that’s available but needs the right technology to unlock its value. Enphase is teaming up with NXP to show how intelligent systems can create greater energy independence.

We sat down with Marco Krapels, Head of Global Energy Markets and Chief Marketing Officer at Enphase, to explore how this partnership is accelerating the shift toward a more intelligent, secure energy future.

Enphase offers a fully connected home energy ecosystem. What does that look like?

Marco: In our fourth-generation energy system, solar, storage, EV charging and intelligent controls all work together in real time. It's how we turn homeowners into their own clean energy power plants.

A key addition is our soon-to-be-released IQ Bidirectional EV Charger. This charger is built on open standards like ISO 15118, so it's designed to work with virtually all EVs, all grid profiles and all types of homes.

What makes it powerful is the flexibility it unlocks. With this technology paired with an Enphase Energy System, your car can charge from clean, affordable solar power. It can power your home during outages. And when the grid is strained, it can send power back to support your community. Because vehicles spend most of their lives parked, bidirectional EV charging turns that idle capacity into a meaningful energy resource — one that strengthens the grid and creates new value for homeowners.

We've deployed five million home energy systems globally. This charger — built in collaboration with NXP — turns each of those homes into a distributed grid asset that can respond in real time.

What NXP technology is powering the bidirectional EV charger, and how did working together shape the product?

Marco: The charger is powered by NXP’s i.MX 93 applications processor, which manages the real-time communication between the EV, the battery and the cloud.

We also used NXP chips for security, Wi-Fi, NFC and USB connectivity, power management and analog elements such as real-time clocking.

But the collaboration went far beyond the silicon. The work between Enphase engineering and the NXP design service team made a significant difference. NXP’s system-level expertise in digital hardware and secure communication, combined with Enphase’s leadership in power electronics, safety and EV charging, helped speed up product development. Their teams stayed closely aligned with ours, and when challenges came up, we had direct access to support. Getting answers quickly made a huge difference.

That level of collaboration doesn’t just accelerate development — it shapes what you can deliver. What you see in this solution reflects that deep partnership.

Electricity demand is climbing fast — especially with the growth of AI and data centers. How can distributed energy help meet that need?

Marco: Data centers are projected to consume 12% of U.S. electricity by 2030 — almost triple today’s levels. Traditional power plants take over a decade to build. Solar and batteries can deploy 10 times faster than fossil or nuclear-based power plants, becoming operational in months instead of years.

Enphase systems have already generated 107 terawatt hours of clean energy and can provide more than 100 megawatts of evening peak support today. With bidirectional EV charging, that impact grows. If even half our customers adopt batteries and intelligent charging, that would provide around five gigawatts of flexible capacity distributed across communities.

The grid needs to become smarter and more responsive. That takes collaboration at every level — starting with the silicon that enables real-time, secure intelligence, through the software that coordinates energy flow, all the way to how homes connect to the grid. What we’re building with NXP shows what happens when you get that collaboration right.

For more information please visit Power and Energy.

About Enphase Energy

Enphase Energy, a global energy technology company based in Fremont, CA, is a leading supplier of microinverter-based solar and battery systems, EV chargers, home energy management systems and virtual power plant (VPP) solutions. Enphase products enable people to harness the sun to make, use, save and sell their own power, all controlled through the Enphase App. The company revolutionized the solar industry with its microinverter-based technology and has shipped approximately 84.8 million microinverters, with more than 5.0 million Enphase-based systems deployed in over 160 countries.

Learn more about Enphase