Make solar projects cheaper and faster with portable factories
Since the price of solar panels has plummeted in recent decades, the installation costs have seized a larger share in the general price tag of the technology. The long installation process for solar farms is also on the rise as an important bottleneck in the use of solar energy.
Now the Startup-Robotics is developing factories for solar installation to speed up the process of building large-scale solar farms. The company factories are sent to the location of solar projects, where equipment including traces, mounting brackets and panels are entered in the system and are automatically assembled. A robot vehicle autonomously puts the end product – which comes down to a past part of Zonneboerderij – in its last place.
“We regard this as the Henry Ford moment for solar energy,” says CEO Banks Hunter ’15, who founded Charge Robotics with colleague Mit -Alumnus Max Justicz ’17. “We go from a very customized, hands -On, manual installation process to something much streamlined and set up for mass production. There are all kinds of benefits that go with it, including consistency, quality, speed, costs and safety.”
Last year, solar energy accounted for 81 percent of the new electric capacity in the US, and Hunter and Justicz see their factories if necessary for continuous acceleration in industry.
The founders say they were met skepticism when they first revealed their plans. But at the beginning of last year they started a prototype system that successfully built a solar farm with SOLV Energy, one of the largest solar installers in the US, Charge raised $ 22 million later this year for the first commercial implementations.
From surgical robots to sunbots
While he was a main subject in Mechanical Engineering at MIT, Hunter thought many apologies to build things. Such an excuse was 2,009 (product technology processes), where he and his classmates built a smart watch for communication in remote areas.
After graduation, Hunter worked for the MIT-Alumni-Found Startups Shaper Tools and deputy surgical surgery. Vicarious Surgical is a medical robotics company that has collected more than $ 450 million so far. Hunter was the second employee and worked there for five years.
“Many really hands-on, project-based classes at MIT translated directly into my first roles that came from school and set me up as very independent and ran large engineering projects,” says Hunter, “in particular 2,009 course was a big launch point for me. The founders of Vicarious Surgical came in contact with me until including 2,009 networks.”
Already in 2017, Hunter and Justicz, who studying in mechanical engineering and computer science, had discussed together with starting a company. But they had to decide where they apply their broad engineering and product skills.
“We both care a lot about climate change. We see climate change as the biggest problem that influences the largest number of people on the planet,” says Hunter. “Our mentality was that if we can build something, we might as well build something that really matters.”
In the process of cold -calling hundreds of people in the energy industry, the founders decided that solar energy was the future of energy production because the price of it fell so quickly.
“It will be cheaper faster than any other form of energy production in human history,” says Hunter.
When the founders started visiting construction sites for the large, utility scale solar farms that form most of the energy generation, it was not difficult to find the bottlenecks. The first site they traveled to was in the Mojave desert in California. Hunter describes it as a huge dust bowl, where thousands of employees repeat tasks for months, such as the movement of material and mounting the same parts, again and again.
“The site had something like 2 million panels on it, and everyone was assembled and attached in the same way,” says Hunter. “Max and I thought it was insane. There is no way to transform the energy letter into a short time window.”
Hunter says that he has heard from each of the largest sun companies in the US that their greatest limitation of scales was labor shortages. The problem was delaying growth and killing projects.
Hunter and Justicz founded load robotics in 2021 to break that bottleneck. Their first step was to order Utility solar parties and to mount them in their backyard by hand.
“From there we came up with this portable assembly line that we could send to construction sites and then feed the entire solar system, including the steel traces, mounting brackets, fasteners and the solar panels,” Hunter explains. “The assembly line mounts all those pieces to produce completed sunbaths, which are chunks of a solar farm.”
Each bay represents a 40-foot piece of the solar farm and weighs around 800 pounds. A robot vehicle takes it to the final location in the field. Hunter says that the Charge system automates all mechanical installation, except the pole process that floats the first metal stakes in the ground.
The assembly lines of the load also have machine-vision systems that scan each component to guarantee quality, and the systems work with the most common solar parties and panel sizes.
From pilot to product
When the founders started pitching their plans to investors and construction companies, people did not believe it was possible.
“The first feedback was actually:” This will never work, “says Hunter.” But as soon as we took our first system in the field and people saw it work, they became much more excited and started to believe it was real. “
Since that first implementation, the Charge team has made its system faster and easier to operate. The company is planning to set up its factories on project sites and run them in collaboration with sun buildings. The factories can even walk alongside human employees.
“With our system, people remotely serve robot equipment instead of using the screws themselves,” explains Hunter. “We can essentially supply the assembled solar energy to customers. Their only responsibility is to deliver the materials and parts on large pallets that we feed in our system.”
Hunter says that several factories can be used on the same site and can also work 24/7 to drastically speed up projects.
“We get the boundaries of solar growth because these companies don’t have enough people,” says Hunter. “We can build much larger sites much faster with the same number of people by simply sending more of our factories. It is a fundamental new way to scale solar energy.”
Video: “Load robotics sunrise completely autonomous sunbouw system”
