As the value of photo voltaic panels has plummeted in current a long time, set up prices have taken up a larger share of the know-how’s general price ticket. The lengthy set up course of for photo voltaic farms can also be rising as a key bottleneck within the deployment of photo voltaic power.
Now the startup Cost Robotics is creating photo voltaic set up factories to hurry up the method of constructing large-scale photo voltaic farms. The corporate’s factories are shipped to the positioning of utility photo voltaic initiatives, the place tools together with tracks, mounting brackets, and panels are fed into the system and robotically assembled. A robotic automobile autonomously places the completed product — which quantities to a accomplished part of photo voltaic farm — in its closing place.
“We consider this because the Henry Ford second for photo voltaic,” says CEO Banks Hunter ’15, who based Cost Robotics with fellow MIT alumnus Max Justicz ’17. “We’re going from a really bespoke, arms on, handbook set up course of to one thing rather more streamlined and arrange for mass manufacturing. There are every kind of advantages that come together with that, together with consistency, high quality, pace, price, and security.”
Final 12 months, photo voltaic power accounted for 81 % of recent electrical capability within the U.S., and Hunter and Justicz see their factories as obligatory for continued acceleration within the trade.
The founders say they had been met with skepticism once they first unveiled their plans. However at first of final 12 months, they deployed a prototype system that efficiently constructed a photo voltaic farm with SOLV Vitality, one of many largest photo voltaic installers within the U.S. Now, Cost has raised $22 million for its first industrial deployments later this 12 months.
From surgical robots to photo voltaic robots
Whereas majoring in mechanical engineering at MIT, Hunter discovered loads of excuses to construct issues. One such excuse was Course 2.009 (Product Engineering Processes), the place he and his classmates constructed a wise look ahead to communication in distant areas.
After commencement, Hunter labored for the MIT alumni-founded startups Shaper Instruments and Vicarious Surgical. Vicarious Surgical is a medical robotics firm that has raised greater than $450 million to this point. Hunter was the second worker and labored there for 5 years.
“Loads of actually arms on, project-based courses at MIT translated instantly into my first roles popping out of faculty and set me as much as be very unbiased and run giant engineering initiatives,” Hunter says, “Course 2.009, specifically, was an enormous launch level for me. The founders of Vicarious Surgical received in contact with me by means of the two.009 community.”
As early as 2017, Hunter and Justicz, who majored in mechanical engineering and laptop science, had mentioned beginning an organization collectively. However they needed to resolve the place to use their broad engineering and product skillsets.
“Each of us care quite a bit about local weather change. We see local weather change as the largest drawback impacting the best variety of individuals on the planet,” Hunter says. “Our mentality was if we are able to construct something, we would as nicely construct one thing that actually issues.”
Within the technique of chilly calling tons of of individuals within the power trade, the founders determined photo voltaic was the way forward for power manufacturing as a result of its worth was lowering so shortly.
“It’s turning into cheaper quicker than some other type of power manufacturing in human historical past,” Hunter says.
When the founders started visiting building websites for the big, utility-scale photo voltaic farms that make up the majority of power technology, it wasn’t onerous to seek out the bottlenecks. The primary web site they traveled to was within the Mojave Desert in California. Hunter describes it as a large mud bowl the place hundreds of employees spent months repeating duties like transferring materials and assembling the identical elements, time and again.
“The positioning had one thing like 2 million panels on it, and each single one was assembled and fixed the identical approach by hand,” Hunter says. “Max and I believed it was insane. There’s no approach that may scale to remodel the power grid in a brief window of time.”
Hunter says he heard from every of the biggest photo voltaic firms within the U.S. that their largest limitation for scaling was labor shortages. The issue was slowing progress and killing initiatives.
Hunter and Justicz based Cost Robotics in 2021 to interrupt by means of that bottleneck. Their first step was to order utility photo voltaic elements and assemble them by hand of their backyards.
“From there, we got here up with this moveable meeting line that we might ship out to building websites after which feed in all the photo voltaic system, together with the metal tracks, mounting brackets, fasteners, and the photo voltaic panels,” Hunter explains. “The meeting line robotically assembles all these items to provide accomplished photo voltaic bays, that are chunks of a photo voltaic farm.”
Every bay represents a 40-foot piece of the photo voltaic farm and weighs about 800 kilos. A robotic automobile brings it to its closing location within the discipline. Hunter says Cost’s system automates all mechanical set up apart from the method of pile driving the primary steel stakes into the bottom.
Cost’s meeting traces even have machine-vision programs that scan every half to make sure high quality, and the programs work with the commonest photo voltaic elements and panel sizes.
From pilot to product
When the founders began pitching their plans to traders and building firms, individuals didn’t imagine it was attainable.
“The preliminary suggestions was principally, ‘This can by no means work,’” Hunter says. “However as quickly as we took our first system out into the sector and folks noticed it working, they received rather more excited and began believing it was actual.”
Since that first deployment, Cost’s group has been making its system quicker and simpler to function. The corporate plans to arrange its factories at mission websites and run them in partnership with photo voltaic building firms. The factories might even run alongside human employees.
“With our system, persons are working robotic tools remotely somewhat than placing within the screws themselves,” Hunter explains. “We will primarily ship the assembled photo voltaic to prospects. Their solely accountability is to ship the supplies and elements on large pallets that we feed into our system.”
Hunter says a number of factories might be deployed on the identical web site and will additionally function 24/7 to dramatically pace up initiatives.
“We are hitting the boundaries of photo voltaic progress as a result of these firms don’t have sufficient individuals,” Hunter says. “We will construct a lot greater websites a lot quicker with the identical variety of individuals by simply transport out extra of our factories. It’s a basically new approach of scaling photo voltaic power.”
