As the worth of photo voltaic panels has plummeted in latest a long time, set up prices have taken up a larger share of the expertise’s total price ticket. The lengthy set up course of for photo voltaic farms can be rising as a key bottleneck within the deployment of photo voltaic power.
Now the startup Cost Robotics is growing 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 location of utility photo voltaic tasks, the place gear 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 last 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, palms on, guide set up course of to one thing far more streamlined and arrange for mass manufacturing. There are every kind of advantages that come together with that, together with consistency, high quality, pace, value, and security.”
Final yr, photo voltaic power accounted for 81 % of latest electrical capability within the U.S., and Hunter and Justicz see their factories as mandatory for continued acceleration within the trade.
The founders say they have been met with skepticism after they first unveiled their plans. However at first of final yr, they deployed a prototype system that efficiently constructed a photo voltaic farm with SOLV Power, one of many largest photo voltaic installers within the U.S. Now, Cost has raised $22 million for its first business deployments later this yr.
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 sensible 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.
“A variety of actually palms on, project-based courses at MIT translated immediately into my first roles popping out of college and set me as much as be very impartial and run giant engineering tasks,” Hunter says, “Course 2.009, specifically, was a giant launch level for me. The founders of Vicarious Surgical obtained in contact with me by means of the two.009 community.”
As early as 2017, Hunter and Justicz, who majored in mechanical engineering and pc 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 so much about local weather change. We see local weather change as the most important downside impacting the best variety of folks on the planet,” Hunter says. “Our mentality was if we will construct something, we’d as properly construct one thing that actually issues.”
Within the means of chilly calling a whole lot of individuals within the power trade, the founders determined photo voltaic was the way forward for power manufacturing as a result of its value was reducing so shortly.
“It’s turning into cheaper quicker than every other type of power manufacturing in human historical past,” Hunter says.
When the founders started visiting building websites for the massive, utility-scale photo voltaic farms that make up the majority of power era, it wasn’t arduous to search 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 shifting materials and assembling the identical components, over and over.
“The location had one thing like 2 million panels on it, and each single one was assembled and mounted the identical method by hand,” Hunter says. “Max and I believed it was insane. There’s no method that may scale to rework 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 development and killing tasks.
Hunter and Justicz based Cost Robotics in 2021 to interrupt by means of that bottleneck. Their first step was to order utility photo voltaic components and assemble them by hand of their backyards.
“From there, we got here up with this transportable 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 last location within the area. Hunter says Cost’s system automates all mechanical set up aside from the method of pile driving the primary steel stakes into the bottom.
Cost’s meeting strains even have machine-vision programs that scan every half to make sure high quality, and the programs work with the commonest photo voltaic components and panel sizes.
From pilot to product
When the founders began pitching their plans to traders and building firms, folks didn’t imagine it was potential.
“The preliminary suggestions was mainly, ‘This may by no means work,’” Hunter says. “However as quickly as we took our first system out into the sector and other people noticed it working, they obtained far more excited and began believing it was actual.”
Since that first deployment, Cost’s crew has been making its system quicker and simpler to function. The corporate plans to arrange its factories at challenge 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 gear remotely moderately than placing within the screws themselves,” Hunter explains. “We will basically ship the assembled photo voltaic to clients. Their solely accountability is to ship the supplies and components on huge 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 tasks.
“We are hitting the bounds of photo voltaic development as a result of these firms don’t have sufficient folks,” Hunter says. “We will construct a lot larger websites a lot quicker with the identical variety of folks by simply transport out extra of our factories. It’s a essentially new method of scaling photo voltaic power.”
