Because the price of solar panels has dropped in recent decades, the installation costs have brought a greater share in the overall price of technology. The long installation process for solar farms also appears as a key bottleneck in the implementation of solar energy.
Now Startup Charge Robotics is developing solar installations factories to speed up the process of building huge solar farms. The company’s factories are sent to the place of solar projects, in which equipment, including track, assembly brackets and panels, are administered to the system and automatically installed. The robotic vehicle autonomously places the finished product – which is a completed part of the solar farm – in its last place.
“We think about it as Henry Ford Moment for Solar,” says CEO Banks Hunter ’15, who founded Robotics with another graduate of Mit Max Justicz ’17. “We go very much to order, manual installation process for something much more improved and configured for mass production. There are many benefits that, along with this, including consistency, quality, speed, cost and security. “
Solar energy last year settled 81 percent of up-to-date electrical abilities in the USA, Hunter and Justicz see their factories as necessary for further acceleration in the industry.
The founders claim that they met with skepticism when they first presented their plans. But at the beginning of last year, they implemented a prototype system that successfully built a shining farm from Solv Energy, one of the largest solar installers in the USA, the fee collected $ 22 million for the first commercial implementation this year.
From surgical robots to shining works
During mechanical engineering in Mit Hunter he found many excuses to build things. One such excuse was the 2.009 (Product Engineering Processes) course, in which he and his classmates built a astute watch for communication in distant areas.
After graduating from his studies, he worked for broken graduates, the starts of the startups Shaper Tools and surgical substitute. Vicarious Surgical is a medical company that has collected over $ 450 million so far. Banks was the second employee and worked there for five years.
“Many really practical classes based on projects in the myth translated directly into my first roles coming out of school and established me to be very independent and conduct large engineering projects,” says Banks, “in particular the course 2.009 was a big starting point for me. The founders of Vicarious Surgical contacted me via the 2.009 network. “
Already in 2017, Hunter and Justicz, who specialized in mechanical engineering and computer science, talked about the joint foundation of the company. But they had to decide where to utilize their broad engineering and product skills.
“We both care about climate change. We see climate change as the biggest problem affecting the largest number of people on the planet, “says Hunter. “Our mentality was, if we can build something, we might as well build something that really matters.”
During the chilly calling of hundreds of people in the energy industry, the founders decided that Solar is the future of energy production, because its price dropped so quickly.
“It becomes cheaper faster than any other form of energy production in human history,” says Hunter.
When the founders began to visit the buildings of huge solar farms on a public utility, which constitute a mass of energy generation, it was not hard to find a bottleneck. The first page they traveled was in the Mojave desert in California. Hunter describes this as a massive dust bowl, in which thousands of employees spent months, repeating tasks such as moving the material and folding the same parts, over and over again.
“The site had about 2 million panels, and each of them was assembled and fastened in the same way,” says Hunter. “Max and I thought it was crazy. There is no way to scale to transform the power grid in a short time. “
Hunter says that he heard from each of the largest solar companies in the USA, that their greatest limitation of scaling were labor deficiencies. The problem was slowing down and killing projects.
Hunter and Justicz founded Charge Robotics in 2021 to break this bottleneck. Their first step was to order usable shining parts and install them manually in the yards.
“From there, we came up with this portable assembly line that we could send to construction sites, and then feed in the entire solar system, including steel tracks, mounting brackets, connecting elements and solar panels,” explains Hunter. “A robotically assembly line folds all these elements to produce completed sunbathers, which are fragments of the solar farm.”
Each bay represents a 40-meter piece of solar farm and weighs about 800 pounds. The robotic vehicle moves it to the final place in the field. Banks claims that the Charge system automates the entire mechanical installation, except for the pile of driving the first metal rates in the ground.
Charge mounting lines also have machine vision systems that scan each part to ensure quality, and the systems work with the most common sun parts and panel sizes.
From pilot to product
When the founders began to throw their plans to investors and construction companies, people did not believe that it was possible.
“Initial feedback was basically:” It will never work, “says Hunter. “But as soon as we led our first system to the pitch and people saw that it works, they were much more excited and began to believe that it was real.”
From this first implementation, Charge has accelerated and easier to use its system. The company plans to set up its factories on design pages and run them in cooperation with construction companies. The factories could even run next to human employees.
“In our system, people support robotic equipment remotely, and do not put on the screws themselves,” explains Hunter. “In principle, we can provide the collected solar solar to customers. Their only responsibility is the supply of materials and parts of huge pallets, which we supply to our system. “
Hunter claims that many factories can be placed in the same place and can also work 24/7 to radically accelerate projects.
“We They reach the limits of solar growth because these companies do not have enough people, “says Hunter. “We can build much larger sites much faster with the same number of people, sending more of our factories. This is basically a up-to-date way of scaling solar energy. “