Nextpower, which until last fall was known as Nextracker, transformed utility-scale solar with its tracking technology that boosted energy yields and helped preserve agricultural land.
A rebrand last year hinted at its next act: expanding into more corners of renewable power. Since May, the company has made a series of acquisitions that have solidified a plan to disrupt the inverter market and expand into battery storage.
Nextpower acquired the inverter manufacturer Zigor Corporation, based in Spain, and its U.S. subsidiary Apex Power, as well as Prevalon Energy that deploys battery storage for utilities, independent power producers, and hyperscale data centers. Nextpower also announced plans to acquire Zimmermann PV-Steel Group, a German company that makes solar mounting systems for water and carports.
Dan Shugar, Nextpower’s CEO who founded the company in 2012, told Latitude Media that he always envisioned expanding into additional products and services, and has spent the recent years talking to customers about their pain points. And after ending 2025 with more $760 million in cash on hand, as well as a billion-dollar line of credit, the timing post-rebrand was right.
The inverter opening
Inverters are a big opportunity, Shugar said, describing the technology as the “Achilles heel” of the energy industry for decades. Inverter manufacturers, the majority of which are in China, have driven prices down in part by increasing the amount of electrical current that flows through their transistors. That lowered the upfront dollar-per-watt cost, but also raised their operating temperature, causing them to wear out faster.
“If you start driving these units to really high operating currents and temperatures, you fall off a cliff in terms of performance,” Shugar said. “That is the biggest reason inverters atrophy.”
Nextpower aims to solve this problem by making its own inverters and boosting Apex Power’s manufacturing capacity in the U.S. The products will have their own use cases in solar and storage, Shugar said, and by next summer Apex aims to scale up to 10 gigawatts of capacity.
It’s good timing, given the Trump administration in July banned imports of foreign power inverters, citing national security concerns. The ban applies to future new models of inverters and not those already being sold into the U.S. today. Inverters are connected to communication networks and therefore are regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. Shugar said Nextpower’s products can be sold globally and are in compliance with the current FCC requirements.
Asked whether manufacturing inverters in the U.S. will make them more expensive than the imported options, Shugar said he expects Nextpower’s products to be cost-competitive. He added that the price of an inverter is only one component of a project’s total cost, and customers also consider reliability, logistics, schedule certainty, service, and long-term maintenance costs.
“Our U.S. manufacturing strategy is designed to reduce project risk, strengthen supply-chain resilience, and improve overall project economics over the life of the system,” Shugar said.
Storage and beyond
The expansion into inverters aligns with Nextpower’s reentry into the storage market.
The company tested a few lithium-ion and flow batteries pilot projects about eight years ago. But it was too early to move into the space, given safety issues and the upfront costs at the time. Today, though, Shugar said those problems have largely been resolved and the market is growing fast. Nexpower projects that global demand for BESS outside of China could be up to $35 billion by 2030, with the U.S. comprising half that total. An acquisition presented the quickest way for the company to take advantage.
“We decided we didn’t have a lot of all the core expertise internally, and we thought it would take too long to build that,” he said. “So we decided to do an acquisition.”
Shugar said he spoke to eight Prevalon Energy (now called Nextpower Energy Storage) customers before making a bid, including major utilities and hyperscalers. The company has completed 38 storage projects totaling 6 GW, and has another contract with a hyperscale data center.
Aside from the typical storage use cases — like soaking up solar and wind energy when prices are low and dispatching it during peak demand, as well as stabilizing the grid when it’s stressed — there’s another opportunity emerging: deploying batteries as a shock absorber for AI data centers, whose electricity use can spike, or fall off, within milliseconds. That kind of swing can damage transformers and gas turbines.
“An inverter [combined with] batteries is the right technology to solve that issue because it’s hyper fast to discharge or charge,” Shugar said. “That’s a use case no one was talking about three or four years ago.” He added that Prevalon is working on fulfilling a 1.3-GW project with a Tier 1 hyperscaler data center customer for exactly this purpose.
At the same time, Shugar is optimistic that the renewable energy sector will continue to grow despite the Trump administration blocking wind and solar permits and rolling back federal tax credits for the technologies. He pointed to data showing that the industry accounted for 90% of the new capacity added to the grid in 2025, as well as Nextpower’s more than $5-billion backlog in its solar tracking business — up from $2.1 billion three years ago when the company went public — and another $300-million backlog on the storage side.
“The bottom line is that despite headwinds, the industry is growing,” he said.
