City Electric Supply (CES) is set to acquire PV equipment distributor Soligent. The company will become a subsidiary of CES, assuming leadership of CES’s renewables division.
Soligent distributes a variety of models of solar panels, inverters, energy storage solutions, racking, charge controllers, and monitoring equipment. It carries products from SolarEdge, Enphase, Canadian Solar, Trina, Hanwha and more across the U.S.
The transaction follows CES’s acquisition of Segen, a wholesale distributor of residential and commercial rooftop PV systems with operations in the UK, Germany, and South Africa.
CES and Soligent said their combined strengths will further support the companies’ 50% growth rates.
High growth rates for solar distribution may continue, as the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) targets moving solar from 3% of all generation today to over 40% by 2035. DOE said this level of deployment would entail a three-to-four times increase in current deployment rates.
Such investment in solar may lead to as many as 500,000 to 1,500,000 solar industry workers by 2035, said DOE, effectively multiplying the current workforce of 231,000. Notably, the industry peaked employment levels in 2016 at 260,000, but increases in workforce productivity and the COVID-19 pandemic have slowed jobs numbers in recent years.
