Every solar farm faces the same quiet problem. The sun shines hardest at noon, but homes and factories want their power in the evening. Batteries bridge that gap — yet bridging it takes a translator, a piece of power electronics that can move huge amounts of energy between the solar panels and the battery bank without wasting it on the way. At the Renewable Energy India Expo 2026 in Greater Noida, a Gurugram company that has spent more than two decades building exactly that kind of hardware unveiled its newest answer.
The company is VNT, formally Vrinda Nano Technologies, and the product is the VNT-RAV5, a bidirectional DC-DC converter the company says is fully designed and manufactured in India. Unveiled on 22 October 2026 at REI Expo 2026, it was inaugurated at the VNT booth by SivaKumar V. Vepakomma, Director (Power Systems) at the Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI).
The missing link between panels and batteries
Most solar-plus-storage plants today are AC-coupled: the solar panels feed an inverter that makes AC power, and a separate system converts that AC back to DC to charge the batteries — then converts it again when the stored energy is needed. Every conversion step loses a little energy and adds equipment, cost and floor space.
The RAV5 takes the shorter route. The company says it connects directly to the solar DC bus and the battery storage, letting energy flow efficiently in both directions — charging the batteries when the sun is strong and discharging them when demand rises. Its modular architecture is designed to cut conversion losses, reduce the equipment needed and shrink the system footprint compared with conventional AC-coupled setups.
Why modular multilevel matters
The RAV5 is built on MMC technology — modular multilevel conversion. Instead of one giant converter doing all the work, the design stacks identical building-block modules that share the load. The company says this makes the system scalable and future-ready: capacity can grow by adding modules, and the same core architecture can serve projects of very different sizes.
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That scalability is the point. The company says the RAV5 is designed for utility-scale solar and battery projects, DC-coupled storage systems, industrial applications and future high-power energy systems — the places where India’s clean-energy build-out is heading fastest, as solar-plus-storage becomes the default rather than the exception.
Two decades of power electronics behind it
VNT is not a newcomer to this world. Founded in 2003 and headquartered at IMT Manesar in Gurugram, the company says it employs more than 400 people, serves more than 1,000 customers and has supplied solar solutions totalling more than 50 GW globally, alongside more than 250,000 solutions for telecom sites. Its manufacturing facilities span IMT Manesar and the Model Economic Township at Yakubpur in Haryana, and its presence extends to Canada, the Philippines, the USA, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and the UAE.
Its track record runs through the unglamorous backbone of Indian infrastructure. The company says its super high-efficiency power systems keep telecom towers running across the country, including in remote areas, while its solar string combiner boxes with wireless monitoring watch over solar farms down to the individual string. In e-mobility, its charger range spans AC chargers from 3.3 kW to 22 kW and DC fast chargers from 60 kW to 640 kW, with megawatt-class systems for mining vehicles.
Perhaps the most striking proof of that capability sits far from India. VNT partnered with Larsen & Toubro to supply wireless string monitoring boxes for the world’s largest green hydrogen plant at Oxagon, part of Saudi Arabia’s NEOM region, where the NEOM Green Hydrogen Company aims to produce up to 600 tonnes of carbon-free hydrogen a day. The company says those monitoring boxes were designed to withstand harsh desert conditions, including sandstorms, while tracking every solar string wirelessly.
Built for the battery era
The RAV5 brings that same engineering home to India’s energy transition. As the country pairs ever-larger solar farms with battery storage, the winners will not only be the companies that make the panels or the cells — they will be the companies that move power between them with the least waste. VNT’s managing director, Dr Vikas Almadi, put it simply at the launch: the future of renewable energy is not only about generating clean power, but about storing and managing it intelligently.
With the RAV5, the company says, that intelligence now has an Indian-built home — a converter designed in Gurugram, built for gigawatt-scale solar farms, and ready for the battery era India is building toward.
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