Spain's Power Electronics Builds Factory in Houston, Heron Power Gets RWE Pilot

en.Wedoany.com Reported - Spain's Power Electronics has broken ground on a new campus in Houston, Texas, and held a groundbreaking celebration on September 24. The campus covers 53 hectares and integrates logistics, production, electronics manufacturing, research and development (R&D), and training in one location, and is expected to create more than 400 jobs in the Houston area.

Power Electronics' energy storage business is mainly focused on solar inverters and power conversion systems (PCS), while also providing solutions to the data center and electric mobility industries. Regarding the Houston campus, the company only gave the figure of 40GW of annual capacity once fully ramped up; initial capacity, product mix, and the expected ramp-up date were not disclosed. According to the company, this will be its most highly automated inverter production base to date and a long-term investment in American industry, skilled jobs, technological innovation, and energy infrastructure. Once the campus is operational, Power Electronics' total global annual capacity will increase to 105GW.

Demand for power electronics is rising along with the expansion of the energy industry and the data center market, and domestic U.S. content supply chains are receiving increasing attention, making PCS manufacturers a focus of the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) market. Earlier this month, Goldman Sachs Alternatives and Cleanhill Partners, the owners of U.S. power electronics manufacturer EPC Power Corp, agreed to sell the company to manufacturing group Flex for $4.4 billion, ending their four-year ownership of the inverter manufacturer.

M&A activity in the battery energy storage system (BESS) industry has also involved other power electronics companies, with the more closely watched case being U.S. system integrator Powin; after Powin ceased operations, Hitachi Energy acquired Eks Energy. There has also been activity in the solar sector: ABB acquired Gamesa Electric and its solar PV and battery inverter product lines in 2025, thereby re-entering the power electronics market, and one year later launched a product portfolio based on Gamesa Electric intellectual property.

Drew Baglino, founder and CEO of Heron Power, believes that the limited availability of scalable, grid-enhancing technologies has become one of the bottlenecks in meeting growing electricity demand. The former Tesla senior vice president of powertrain and energy engineering said his newly founded power electronics startup plans to produce up to 40GW per year of its Heron Link integrated power conversion solution at its Morgan Hill, California, factory by the end of 2027, equivalent to as many as 10,000 units.

Heron Link is a 5MW medium-voltage PCS for large-scale energy and data center projects, integrating a bidirectional inverter with a solid-state transformer (SST). Heron Power said in August that it plans to invest more than $100 million in the factory; since February 2026, the company has raised $200 million across two funding rounds and has appointed former Tesla chief financial officer Zachary Kirkhorn to its board.

On September 21, Heron Power announced that RWE Americas will pilot the deployment of Heron Link at a renewable energy and energy storage project in Texas. The pilot will take place at the company's RWE BESS facility in Scurry County, adjacent to its 249MW Pyron wind farm, where the existing low-voltage inverters and 60Hz transformers will be replaced by Heron Link units.

Under the traditional approach, the direct current produced by solar PV and battery energy storage plants must first be converted by low-voltage inverters and then by medium-voltage transformers into the medium-voltage alternating current used by the grid; Heron Link combines these two types of equipment into one. Heron Power claims that the product can achieve 98.6% DC-to-medium-voltage conversion efficiency and 99.5% lifecycle availability, and also offers advantages such as lower maintenance costs, a domestic U.S. supply chain, and native grid-forming (GFM) controls.

In the solid-state transformer segment, Enphase already has a product on the market; Dr Shawn Qu, chief technology officer of Canadian Solar's E-Storage subsidiary, said the company is currently "exploring" SST technology. Enphase co-founder and chief technology officer Raghu Belur said in an interview with ESN Premium in June that SST technology can integrate and improve the efficiency of the power delivery chain from the utility to the server rack, helping to solve the "power problem" of data centers.

RWE operates a portfolio of more than 13GW of renewable energy and battery assets across 27 U.S. states, including 6GW of solar PV and 1.2GW of BESS. Based on the pilot results, RWE may place additional orders for Heron Link and has initially reserved 500MW of initial capacity from Heron Power's U.S. manufacturing facility.