Why Pipelet integrates with solar-inverter clouds — and which manufacturers really matter in DACH.
For home-charging reimbursement, Pipelet today reads charging sessions from two places: the wallbox itself (via OCPP 1.6/2.0.1) and the vehicle (via OEM CarData APIs like BMW, Tesla, Volvo, Audi, Ford). For a large fraction of real-world drivers this is enough.
But it misses one growing segment: customers whose wallbox is bound into a home energy management system via the solar-inverter manufacturer's hub — Fronius Wattpilot, Kostal Enector, SMA eCharger, Huawei Smart Charger, EcoFlow PowerPulse. These wallboxes often don't speak OCPP to the outside world; their session data lives inside the inverter cloud. Without an integration, those drivers can't get their home-charging kWh reimbursed at all.
Eight manufacturers cover the vast majority of installed residential PV in Germany and Austria. Five of them ship a branded wallbox that integrates only with their own inverter ecosystem.
| Manufacturer | Global share 2026 | DACH presence | API access | Own wallbox? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Huawei (FusionSolar) | 29 % | Very high | OAuth2, Token-Request | ✓ Smart Charger |
| Sungrow (iSolarCloud) | 23 % | High | App-key request | ✓ iEV |
| Ginlong/Solis | 8 % | Medium | API-Key | Announced |
| Growatt (ShinePhone) | 6 % | High | API-Key | Since 2025 |
| GoodWe (SEMS) | 5 % | High | License + API key | ✓ HCA |
| SMA | < 5 % | Very high (DE-native) | Modbus + Sunny Portal | ✓ eCharger |
| Fronius | < 5 % | Very high | Local JSON + Solar.web | ✓ Wattpilot (multi-vendor) |
| Kostal (Plenticore) | < 5 % | High | Local JSON | ✓ Enector (PV-only) |
| SolarEdge | ~10 % | High | Public Cloud API + Modbus | ✓ EV Charger |
| Enphase | small, growing | Growing | Public Enlighten OAuth | ✓ IQ EV Charger |
| Solarwatt | small | DE-focused | Local REST on Manager | — |
| EcoFlow (PowerOcean) | small, growing | Growing | Access Key / Secret | ✓ PowerPulse 2 |
Sources: published Q1-2026 market-share reports (Wood Mackenzie, IHS Markit) and manufacturer documentation. Numbers are inverter-shipment-weighted, not installed-capacity-weighted.
Once you look at the API access patterns, the market falls into three clearly distinguishable camps. Knowing which camp a manufacturer belongs to tells you up front how much engineering effort an integration will cost and how reliable it will be in production.
Huawei · Sungrow · RCT Power · E3/DC · EcoFlow
Closed ecosystem. Best out-of-the-box integration with their own wallbox, worst third-party device compatibility. Cloud-only access by design — local Modbus exists but is unofficial.
Pipelet take: Cloud-API integration only. We pull the inverter's view of its bundled wallbox; the customer cannot mix in a different OCPP wallbox without losing the integration.
Fronius · Kostal · GoodWe · FoxESS · SolarEdge · SMA · Solarwatt
Multi-vendor by design. The inverter speaks Modbus or a documented JSON interface locally; the wallbox can be a third-party OCPP device. Cloud APIs exist but local is the gold standard.
Pipelet take: Dual integration: local for privacy-conscious customers (Modbus or local REST), cloud as fallback. The customer keeps freedom to swap wallboxes; we read the inverter purely for surplus-PV context.
All of the above via Enode · Sunvoy · evcc
A single API surface in front of 20–30 manufacturer clouds. Avoids per-brand engineering at the cost of vendor lock-in and per-device OPEX. Best for tail brands.
Pipelet take: Tail-cover only. We build Camp 1 + Camp 2 ourselves (top 80% of DACH market share); for the long tail of niche manufacturers we lean on Enode or Sunvoy so we don't tie up engineering on single-digit-percent share brands.
A fleet manager rolling out home-charging reimbursement to 500 drivers needs the reimbursement flow to work for every driver, not just the ones with an OCPP-capable wallbox. Today, somewhere between 15 % and 30 % of new German residential PV installs come bundled with a brand-locked wallbox that does NOT speak OCPP to the outside. Without inverter-cloud integration, those drivers get stuck.
For the fleet operator the integration also unlocks a second value: PV-surplus charging — now live as a beta (Phase 1B). With knowledge of live inverter production, Pipelet steers the wallbox via OCPP SetChargingProfile so it draws only when the household has solar surplus — meaningful in the post-EEG-feed-in-tariff era where surplus PV is sold cheaply but consumed at retail rate. Drivers opt in per vehicle in the driver portal.
The integration is more than a raw data pull. Where the manufacturer offers it, Pipelet imports the charger's native session history — live for the Enphase IQ EV Charger since June 2026: minute-accurate sessions straight from the Enphase API, full history included on first import. For all other brands, Pipelet runs a brand-agnostic reconstructor that walks the periodic inverter-cloud snapshots and turns them into discrete charging sessions. Both paths produce the same shape OCPP wallboxes and OEM CarData produce — same database table, same fleet-API surface, same reimbursement engine. From the operator's perspective, a kWh that came from an inverter-bundled wallbox looks exactly like one from an OCPP wallbox.
┌──────────────────────┐ ┌─────────────────────┐ ┌─────────────────┐
│ Inverter cloud │ │ Pipelet driver- │ │ Fleet API consumers│
│ Enphase Enlighten, │ ─> │ portal worker │ ─> │ (CF4, FleetX, │
│ Huawei FusionSolar │ │ │ │ partner BIs) │
└──────────────────────┘ │ c4_pv_snapshots │ └─────────────────┘
│ + reconstructor │
│ ↓ │
│ op_charging_ │
│ sessions │
│ id_tag='pv-…' │
└─────────────────────┘
Charging sessions reconstructed from inverter data carry the marker id_tag = "pv-<brand>" in our schema — for example pv-enphase or pv-huawei. Partner portals, dashboards, and the driver portal render those rows with a green "Solar · <Brand>" badge so users see the provenance at a glance. Developer-portal docs describe the markers, the reconstruction algorithm, and how to add a new brand yourself in three files.
We're rolling integrations out market-share-first. The phases below are concrete project gates, not aspirational marketing.
| Phase | What | DACH coverage | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Solarwatt + Enphase + PV-Polling | ≈ 5 % | live |
| 0+ | Snapshot → session reconstructor (brand-agnostic state machine; Enphase IQ EVSE wired) | foundation for 1–4 | live |
| 1 | Huawei FusionSolar + Sungrow iSolarCloud | + 52 % global market share | in clarification |
| 2 | Solax + GoodWe | + 10 % | planning |
| 3 | Fronius + Kostal (local) | DACH power-users | planning |
| 4 | EcoFlow PowerOcean + Tail-Cover via Enode/Sunvoy | long tail | evaluation |
If you operate a fleet whose drivers are spread across multiple PV brands and you want a single home-charging-reimbursement flow that just works: talk to us →