Robots are on a mission: Install solar panels

BY BRAD PLUMER

On Tuesday, AES Corp, one of the country’s biggest renewable energy companies, introduced a first-of-its-kind robot that can lug around and install the thousands of heavy panels that typically make up a large solar array. AES said its robot, nicknamed Maximo, would ultimately be able to install solar panels twice as fast as humans can and at half the cost.

Roughly the size of a pickup truck, Maximo has a large extendable arm that uses suction cups to pick up solar panels one by one and lay them neatly into rows, using artificial intelligence and computer vision to position them properly.

After months of testing, AES will put Maximo to work in the California desert later this year to help install panels at the largest solar-plus-battery project under construction, meant to help power Amazon data centers. If all goes well, the company aims to build hundreds of similar AI-powered robots.

It’s part of a growing trend: Energy companies want to use automation to overcome worker shortages, cut costs and speed up the construction of large solar farms, which has traditionally been very labor-intensive. Without drastic changes, these companies say, it will be impossible to deploy solar power fast enough to tackle global warming and meet the country’s rapidly growing need for electricity. “We’re seeing labor shortages on construction projects in the US, and it’s a bottleneck to the build-out of solar farms,” Andrés Gluski, CEO of AES, said in an interview. “So how do you get around it? Well, robots can work 24 hours, right? Robots can pick up 80-pound solar panels, not a problem.”

The interest in automation comes as President Joe Biden and other politicians have said that a boom in clean energy could create millions of jobs. “Whenever automation comes up, there’s always this push and pull,” said Katie Harris, vice president of federal affairs at the BlueGreen Alliance, a partnership of labor unions and environmental groups. “It can help folks be more productive, but we also want to create good-paying union jobs, and automation isn’t always a friend there.”

Demand for solar power is expected to grow astronomically over the next decade thanks to the plummeting costs of panels, hundreds of billions of dollars in federal subsidies and growing interest from tech companies in securing carbon-free electricity for their data centers. By some estimates, the country will need 475,000 solar workers by 2033, nearly double today’s number. Yet 44 per cent of solar companies already say it is “very difficult” to find qualified workers, according to one recent survey.

It can be especially hard to recruit construction workers for large solar arrays, which are often located in remote desert areas. The job involves lifting and installing hundreds of panels per day, each one weighing 60 pounds or more, in places where temperatures can reach in excess of 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Getting machines to do the job isn’t easy, however. Unlike the robots that work on assembly lines inside factories, robots that operate outdoors have to withstand rain, dirt and mud while dealing with uneven terrain and other surprises.

To overcome those hurdles, AES is counting on advances in AI that allow its robots to recognise and adjust to different types of solar modules and difficult outdoor conditions. “One of the biggest issues we had to deal with was glare,” said Deise Yumi Asami, who founded the company’s Maximo project. When the robot moved from New York to Ohio for testing, it suddenly faced different angles of sunlight reflecting off modules, and the company’s engineers had to train the robot to adapt.

To date, AES has installed 10 megawatts of solar panels with its robots, about enough to power 2,000 homes. The company plans to use Maximo to install 100 megawatts by 2025, though that is still a fraction of the 5,000 megawatts of solar the company expects to build in the next three years. AES hopes to eventually deploy hundreds of robots. Gluski pointed out that AES was one of the first companies to feed power from lithium-ion batteries to the electric grid, a practice that started slowly but has since become widespread. “There’s a learning curve, like with all new technologies,” he said. - The New York Times