Why does inverter size matter? The inverter is already smaller than the battery or PV panel components, so it's not immediately obvious to me what groundbreaking new applications will be possible with an even smaller one.
If inverters were smaller and more efficient, they could be placed on a per-panel basis ("string inverters" or "micro inverters") for significantly better performance, particularly when some of the panels are shaded. See this paper:
> Panels commonly run at 12V (or some low multiple thereof),
That is absolutely not true. Generally speaking nontrivial sized photovoltaic systems are designed with panels in series such that the voltage stays just barely within the 600v rating on the wire.
For example, grid tie inverter, MPPT rated 195-550v:
You're right, panels are generally ganged together in battery to avoid the 'thick copper cable' problem.
However, the individual panel assemblies do run at lower voltages (individual cells run at the band gap of the semiconductor, 1 or 2 V).
It should be noted that placing the panels in series has a significant effect on panel performance when some of the panels are shaded (The entire string outputs at the rate of the shaded panel), so it would be much better to place panels in parallel when possible.
I guess you know that, but just to clarify, there already exist micro-inverters small enough to be installed behind the panel. (E.g. http://enphase.com/m250/)
We're in the process of installing PV right now, so I've been looking into this recently. The micro inverter solution is better when there's partial shading, but the micro inverters do not have higher efficiency than the string inverters. If anything, the assertion seems to be that they actually will have lower efficiency because they generally operate at higher temperature, being up on the roof.
And contrary to the idea about string inverters needing thicker wires, because the AC wiring runs at 240V but the PV DC cabling typically runs at 400-600V, you need larger wires for the micro inverter solution. (But in either cases, resistive losses in the wires are pretty negligible, tenths of a percent in our case.)
Perhaps size is a proxy for cost? I imagine many cost factors scale with size, such as materials cost, shipping cost, installation cost, etc.
Or perhaps tiny inverters could be a good example of disruptive innovation, an invention that looks bad along traditional dimensions but opens up nontraditional applications.
