Beijing Kinglong New Energy Technology (KLNE) Co was founded in 2008 and is based in Beijing, China. The company manufactures solar inverters and monitoring systems. More recently, they have expanded to EV charging systems. KLNE has a local presence in Germany through a partnership with Solar Service Germany (SSG) and a local presence in Italy with Escopiu Srl.
History in Australia
In 2011, KLNE opened an office in Melbourne to tap into the booming Australian market. The office served as the service centre and warranty inquiry point for all its Australian sales. This was seen as a very promising step from KLNE as a local office will give potential customers peace of mind when buying products from KLNE. Unfortunately, the KLNE subsidiary in Australia went bankrupt in 2014 leaving a lot of warranty claims unfulfilled.
While researching market feedback for KLNE inverters, we found mostly negative reviews here and here. However, KLNE inverters were Clean Energy Council (CEC) certified for the Australian market and complied with all Australian standards.
Source: solar quotes website
Products
Currently, KLNE supplies off-grid and on-grid inverters for residential (1.5 kW – 5 kW) and commercial (6kW – 20 kW) systems. They offer 7-year warranty for all of their products with standard specifications for their inverter line-up of products.
KLNE inverter line-up. Source: KLNE website
KLNE inverters are very competitive in price and were offered in Australia with very low pricing tiers. As the old saying goes “you get what you pay for”. It is been several years since they have abandoned the Australian market, so it is difficult to source a unit in Australia for review purposes.
Where are they now?
KLNE continued its expansion, getting its products certified for the Puerto Rican, South African and Brazilian markets. As mentioned before, KLNE is also expanding into the EV charging business, offering DC and AC charging posts.
Additionally, it seems that KLNE is expanding into the battery store business with another business name “Shanghai Dowell Technology Co” (Dowell). During our research we could not find a direct link between both companies, but we did found KLNE reporting news on their website about Dowell and a LinkedIn profile stating the same working title for both companies during the exact same time frame.
Are they coming back to Australia?
There are currently many established players (Goodwe, ABB, Huawei, Fronius, SMA, etc) in the solar inverter market in Australia offering different price points and qualities. Thus, there is no shortage of options to decide which inverter is better for your solar system.
Currently, Australians are looking into home storage systems more closely due to the high peak electricity prices and government incentives. It might be the case that Australian customers and installers have not forgotten their fair share of issues with KLNE inverters but maybe, Dowell could come to Australia in the future and be a player in the home battery storage system.
