In the largest initial public offering of the year, Nextracker has raised $638 million after pricing shares at $24 apiece. The stock started trading on the NASDAQ Thursday morning.
The California-based firm's main line of business is solar tracker systems for grid-scale solar projects. What these trackers do is follow the movement of the sun in order to maximize the amount of power that a panel can absorb throughout the day.
CEO Dan Shugar told Cheddar News that tracking systems can help panels produce up to 25 percent more energy. "Just like a sunflower follows the sun across the sky from east to west, if you move solar panels from east to west across the sky, you get more energy," he said.
Nextracker also develops software to make the trackers even more responsive to meteorological conditions and the site-specific requirements of a solar field.
"What we do is we provide the structures and the control systems and smart software to really optimize the angle of those panels to the sun at any given time," Shugar said.
The IPO comes as solar companies push their advantage in the energy market, with federal subsidies pouring into the sector due to the Inflation Reduction Act. Even without these subsidies, Shugar said, the company is banking on solar beating other energy sources on cost.
"Solar's enjoyed tremendous growth because even unsubsidized solar is the lowest cost way to generate power of any power generation source." he said.
