We Built India's First Grid-Feed Hybrid Inverter in 2017 — then we lost the Indian inverter industry to China.
I am going to write this one differently from the others on this page, because writing it is making me emotional, and I would rather you read what I actually feel than a politely arranged version of it. In 2017 we shipped the first grid-feed hybrid inverter ever built and patented in India. By 2024 China holds 40% of India's inverter imports and 46% of the utility-scale market. I want to walk you through how the first happened, and why the second is harder to undo than anyone realises.
Isolation transformer, 110V–300V grid lock range, battery hybrid. Designed for the countries China was not designing for.
I am going to write this one differently from the others on this page, because writing it is making me emotional, and I would rather you read what I actually feel than a politely arranged version of it. In November 2014 we commissioned what was then India's largest grid-connected rooftop solar installation at Punjab Engineering College in Chandigarh — a 1 MW system. By 2017 we had taken what we learned at megawatt scale and shrunk it down to a 1 kW, 1.5 kW and 3 kW box that an electrician could install in a home. It was India's first grid-feed hybrid inverter. The first one that was patented in India. The first one that combined grid-feed and battery backup in a single product. It was launched at REI 2017. And it should have been the start of something for India's inverter industry. It was not. By 2024 China holds 40% of India's inverter imports, controls 46% of the utility-scale Indian market, and the country that lost the most in this transition is the country I was trying to build for.
The First Batches of Fifty
I want to take you inside the factory in 2017, because the heroic version of this story is wrong. We did not ship the Hybrid GTI in volume from day one. We shipped it in batches of fifty. Fifty units assembled, tested, sent into the field with installers we trusted, and then we waited for the failure reports. Two weeks. Four weeks. Eight weeks. Every report came back and went into the next revision. We changed the snubber circuit on the IGBT stage in batch two. We changed the input rectification topology in batch three. We changed the firmware's anti-islanding response time after a feedback from Uttar Pradesh. By batch six we had a product that was actually ready for thousand-unit runs. By batch ten the design was stable enough that we could promote it at REI 2017 as a commercial product.
This is the part of Make in India that nobody photographs. It is not a ribbon-cutting and a glossy brochure. It is fifty units, fifty installer-reports, fifty deltas in the next revision, repeated until the product works in conditions a Chinese factory testing in coastal Guangdong has never seen.
The Isolation Transformer Decision
The single most important engineering choice we made in the Hybrid GTI was one that the Chinese inverter industry was actively walking away from. We kept the isolation transformer.
In 2015–2017 the global trend in grid-tie inverter design was transformerless, high-frequency switching. Smaller, lighter, cheaper, more efficient on paper. Every major Chinese manufacturer — Sungrow, Growatt, Solis — was building transformerless units. The argument was that the transformer wasted 3–5% of energy in conversion loss, added kilograms of weight, and added cost. For a Chinese factory designing for the German, Japanese, or American grid — clean, stable, well-regulated — the transformerless route made commercial sense.
For India, it was wrong.
A transformerless Chinese inverter, dropped onto an Indian rural feeder with 180V phase-to-neutral and 47 Hz frequency wandering, will either trip out repeatedly or burn out the input stage within months. The same Chinese inverter on a German grid with stable 230V at 50.00 Hz will run for fifteen years. Same hardware. Different operating environment. Different fate.
We made the deliberate decision to absorb the cost and the weight penalty of the transformer because we knew our customers were not in Germany.
110V to 300V — The Specification Nobody Else Was Offering
The second non-obvious choice we made was the grid-lock voltage range.
A typical grid-tie inverter is designed to lock onto a grid that is within plus-or-minus 10% of nominal voltage. For a 230V Indian grid, that means it will operate between roughly 207V and 253V. Outside that range, the inverter trips out and refuses to inject power.
We engineered the Hybrid GTI to lock onto a grid anywhere between 110V and 300V. That is roughly a 50% under-voltage tolerance and a 30% over-voltage tolerance — far beyond the IEC standard for grid-tie equipment, far beyond what any Chinese inverter would attempt.
Hybrid GTI — Published Launch Specifications (REI 2017)
Why this specification mattered: a Nigerian distribution feeder routinely sags to 140V at peak load. A Pakistani feeder hovers at 180V. A Bangladeshi feeder swings from 150V to 250V across the same day. A Ghanaian feeder runs at 195V most evenings. The Chinese transformerless inverter that locks only between 207V and 253V is useless on any of those grids. The Hybrid GTI worked on all of them.
Nigeria, and Why Grid-Feed Alone Was Not the Answer
We shipped the first export units of the Hybrid GTI to Nigeria for field testing in 2017. The decision to start with Nigeria was deliberate. Nigeria's national grid is one of the most fragile in any major economy — outages multiple times per day, voltage swings that would destroy lesser equipment, a customer base that has lived for decades with diesel generators because the grid is unreliable.
We knew that if the product worked in Nigeria, it would work almost anywhere China was choosing not to sell.
It did work. The Nigerian deployment surfaced exactly what we had bet on: the customer's actual need was not "feed solar to the grid." That is the European framing of rooftop solar. The Nigerian customer's actual need was "give me solar power when the sun is up, give me battery power when the sun is down, and feed surplus to the grid when there is one, but do not stop working when the grid disappears." That combination — solar plus battery plus optional grid-feed — only worked because the Hybrid GTI was designed for it from the first transistor.
In a power-deficit country, having simple grid-feed is no solution. The customer needs solar with battery, and the option to grid-feed when conditions permit. The Chinese architecture could not deliver this.
Pause for a moment on what is happening in India's inverter export data today, eight years later. According to recent trade data, the top three destinations for India's inverter exports between March 2023 and February 2024 were the United States, China, and Nigeria — with Nigeria accounting for 12% of India's total inverter exports, 1,174 shipments. Nigeria is still buying from India. The pathway we opened in 2017 was the right one. We did not lose the export market. We lost the domestic one.
The First Indian Patent for a Grid-Feed Hybrid Inverter
The Hybrid GTI was filed as the first patent from India for a grid-feed-plus-battery inverter architecture. The claim was not the grid-feed function alone — that had been patented in the United States and Europe earlier. The claim was the combined system: a hybrid operating-mode controller that switched between grid-feed mode, battery-charging mode, and battery-backup mode based on real-time conditions, with the transitions handled by a state machine that no Indian or foreign manufacturer had filed at that time.
It is part of the 76+ technology patents Su-Kam had filed in India and other countries by the time of my exit from the company. The patent itself outlived the company in IP records. The market position it should have protected did not.
The Geography I Was Designing For
The strategic insight that drove the entire Hybrid GTI program was a geographic one, and I want to lay it out plainly because it is the part of the story most analysts have missed.
China's inverter industry — Sungrow, Growatt, Solis, Huawei — was optimised for power-surplus countries. Countries where the grid is reliable, voltage is stable, frequency is locked, and the customer's only real problem is monetising surplus solar generation. Germany, Japan, Australia, much of the United States, much of Western Europe, the Middle East's wealthier markets, parts of China's own coastal economy. These customers do not need a transformer. They do not need 110V grid-lock. They do not need battery hybrid operation. They need cheap, light, efficient grid-feed and good monitoring. That is what China built.
India, by contrast, was a power-deficit country. So was Nigeria. So were Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam, Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Bolivia, Peru, parts of Indonesia, parts of the Philippines. The customer in any of these countries does not need to monetise surplus solar first. The customer needs power, reliably, when the grid cannot provide it. Grid-feed in these markets is a secondary nice-to-have. Battery backup with solar is the primary need.
My strategy was to let China take the power-surplus markets — they would dominate those regardless of what we did — and for Su-Kam to dominate the power-deficit markets, where Chinese transformerless designs were structurally wrong. We could not match them on factory scale. We could match them on architectural fit.
Documentary Proof — What the Trade Press Wrote in 2017
I want to lean on something other than my own memory for a moment, because this is the kind of claim that should be backed by independent reporting. The Su-Kam Solar Grid-Tie Inverter launch in September 2017 was covered by multiple Indian energy trade publications in real time. The product specifications, the launch date, and the architectural claim were all documented externally before any of this became part of my retrospective story.
From the Energetica India coverage at launch, the published specifications were: DC solar input range of 80 to 450 volts, AC grid lock range of 150 to 280 volts, dual MPPT tracking, IEC certification, dust and rain resistance, and price band of ₹52,000 to ₹86,000 depending on capacity. The commercial published range of 150 to 280 volts AC was the conservative band we listed in the brochure. The actual engineering tolerance the design team had built into the hardware extended down toward 110 volts for the export markets we were preparing — Nigeria, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka — where rural feeders routinely sit below 150 volts. That wider engineering tolerance is what made the Nigeria field testing possible.
The point of pulling these sources together here is simple. None of this is retrospective embellishment. The launch happened. The trade press covered it. The specifications were published. The architecture was claimed in independent reporting. The video evidence on the Su-Kam Solar YouTube channel — which I will link below — is the primary visual record that this product existed, shipped, was installed in customer homes, and worked. That record has not been deleted. Anyone can verify it.
What Actually Happened in the Indian Market After 2018
And then, in 2018, Su-Kam entered Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process. I had no operational role from that point forward — as per the official IBBI record, my directorship ceased upon the initiation. A court-appointed Resolution Professional took control of the company. The Hybrid GTI program lost its champion. The export pipeline lost its planner. The Africa, Middle East, and South-East Asia markets we had been carefully expanding into lost the only Indian manufacturer aggressively building for them.
What happened next is what the import-export data shows.
What India's Inverter Trade Looks Like in 2026
Chinese inverter brands — Growatt, Sungrow, Solis, Huawei, Goodwe — have moved from negligible presence in 2018 to majority share in 2024. Trade publications have been documenting this shift. The Indian companies that survived this transition have largely done so by becoming distributors and rebadgers — buying inverter kits from China, putting Indian brand stickers on them, and selling them to Indian customers. The actual engineering, the actual circuit design, the actual firmware, is increasingly Chinese. The "Indian" inverter you buy from many domestic brand names today is a Chinese product wearing an Indian jersey.
The market understands this. That is why the Chinese brands themselves are gaining share — because customers have figured out they might as well buy directly from the source rather than pay a markup for the Indian sticker.
Make in India — A Campaign Without Data
This is the part that most upsets me, and I want to be direct about it. The Make in India campaign was launched in 2014 with enormous fanfare. Targets were set. Press conferences were held. Logos were designed. But the campaign never collated, never published, and to my knowledge never seriously measured a basic input: who in India was already making the things the campaign was claiming should be made in India?
Su-Kam was Make-in-India before the phrase existed. We were exporting Indian-designed, Indian-manufactured inverters to over 90 countries by the mid-2010s. We had filed dozens of patents. We had a research and development team. We had supply chain depth — local transformer fabricators, local PCB houses, local component sourcing where possible. We were the example the campaign should have been built around.
Nobody in government, to my knowledge, ever sat down with the small set of Indian inverter manufacturers — Su-Kam, Microtek, Luminous, V-Guard, Numeric, others — and asked: what would protect this industry from being eaten by Chinese imports over the next ten years? Tariffs on finished inverters? Local content requirements for solar tenders? PLI incentives for inverter manufacturing? Patent enforcement? Anti-dumping duties? Any of these, applied early, would have given the existing Indian industry a chance to scale. None were applied with the seriousness the moment required.
The campaign was launched on paper. It finished on paper. The data was never collated. The industry it should have protected was allowed to die in plain sight.
What India Actually Lost
I am going to be blunt because I think the country deserves bluntness on this.
When Su-Kam was dismantled through the NCLT process between 2018 and 2019, the country lost more than a company. It lost the only Indian manufacturer at scale that was actively designing for power-deficit markets, actively exporting against Chinese competition in Africa, the Middle East, and South-East Asia, actively filing patents in India and globally, and actively building the supplier ecosystem — transformer fabricators, casing manufacturers, PCB assembly houses, software engineers — that any Indian inverter industry needs to survive.
The supplier ecosystem that grew up around Su-Kam in Gurugram and Baddi over twenty-six years did not vanish overnight. Most of those suppliers re-tooled to serve Chinese-brand imports being assembled in India, or shut down, or pivoted to lower-margin products. The engineering talent at Su-Kam dispersed — some to other Indian manufacturers, some to the Chinese subsidiaries that began setting up operations in Bangalore and Pune precisely to absorb that talent, some out of the inverter industry entirely.
The competitive moat Su-Kam built in Africa and the Middle East — the relationships with national utilities in Nigeria, Kenya, the UAE; the dealer networks in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka; the regulatory approvals in over 90 countries — was not handed off to another Indian manufacturer when the company entered insolvency. Some of it simply collapsed. Some of it was picked up by Chinese exporters who had been waiting for exactly this kind of vacuum.
No one understands what country lost when Su-Kam was dismantled. The proof is in the import data. Look at it before 2018. Look at it after. Then tell me Make in India worked.
What This Article Is Not
I want to be careful about what I am claiming here. I am not claiming Su-Kam would have single-handedly held off Chinese inverter dominance in India. I am not claiming the company should not have entered insolvency — the circumstances around that were what they were, and a court-appointed Resolution Professional handled the process per Indian law. I am not claiming anyone broke the law.
What I am claiming is narrower and more painful. I am claiming that India had a genuine, scaled, patent-holding, export-capable inverter manufacturer designing for the right markets with the right architecture at exactly the moment Indian policy claimed to be building a domestic manufacturing base. And the policy framework did not protect that manufacturer, did not adapt to its loss, and did not seriously document what its disappearance cost the country. The campaign called Make in India never measured what it was actually making. That is the part that breaks my heart when I look at the trade figures.
What I Would Like Someone to Do With This
I am writing this in 2026, eight years after I left Su-Kam. The Indian inverter industry as I knew it is no longer the same industry. The architectural insight the Hybrid GTI captured — that power-deficit countries need transformer-isolated, battery-hybrid, wide-voltage-range inverters, and that this is structurally different from what China builds — is still true. It is still the basis on which an Indian inverter industry could be rebuilt for the export markets China cannot serve well.
I would like the Indian government to pull the actual trade data. Real data, not press-conference figures. Inverter imports by HS code, by country of origin, by year, from 2014 to 2026. Inverter exports by HS code, by country of destination, by year, from 2014 to 2026. Domestic inverter production by company, by year, from 2014 to 2026. The data exists. It has just never been published in a form that lets a policy person ask the right question.
If anyone reading this works in a policy role at MNRE, the Ministry of Commerce, NITI Aayog, or any of the industry associations — pull the data. Read it honestly. The story it tells is the one I have just written, and the story it tells is correctable if the country wants to correct it.
I am sorry I became too emotional in places in this piece. I am sixty-two years old and I have spent my entire adult life in this industry. I do not get to do it again. But somebody else can. I hope they do.
Watch the Era — Su-Kam Solar Channel Archive
The Su-Kam Solar YouTube channel ran from 2014 through early 2018, producing installation guides, product walkthroughs, and field training material. After 2018 the channel went silent — that silence itself is part of the record. What remains is the documentary evidence of the Hybrid GTI architecture in customer hands, on rooftops, being installed and explained by Su-Kam engineers in 2016–2018.
Su-Kam Hybrid GTI Solar System overview — the product walkthrough from the Su-Kam Solar channel describing the combined UPS and grid-feed architecture.
The full Su-Kam Solar channel — over 100,000 subscribers at its peak — is still available at youtube.com/c/sukam. The latest video on that channel is from early 2018, which matches the timeline of the insolvency proceedings beginning. Treat the channel as a primary-source archive of what Indian inverter engineering looked like before the market shifted.
The products described in this article were designed and shipped during my tenure as Founder and Managing Director of Su-Kam Power Systems Ltd., which ended when the company entered Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process under the orders of the Hon'ble NCLT in 2018. As per official IBBI records, my directorship and all associated capacities ceased upon that initiation, and a court-appointed Resolution Professional thereafter assumed control of the company.
I have had no involvement, affiliation, directorship, supply relationship, or operational role with Su-Kam Power Systems Ltd. in any form since 2019. Nothing in this article is a current product claim, a sales recommendation, a warranty, or an endorsement of any product currently sold under the Su-Kam brand name.
If anyone approaches you offering to sell, supply, service or warrant Su-Kam products on the strength of my name, my engineering history, or any claimed association with me, please be aware that no such association exists. Do not transact with anyone who claims to represent me in connection with Su-Kam Power Systems or any product currently sold under that brand. I do not endorse, supply, sell, service, or warrant any such product, and I am not party to any commercial dealing involving the brand today.
The engineering principles described in this article outlived the company. My personal name has nothing to do with what is sold under that brand today.