Solar panels convert the sun's rays into clean electricity, but when their surfaces become tarnished, efficiency can plummet, resulting in the need for a good cleaning.
Ecoppia, founded in 2013, has been providing sites across the globe with just such a service, as highlighted by the World Economic Forum in a short video. The company's autonomous panel-cleaning robots have helped to maintain solar efficiency as we push toward shared climate goals.
Cleaning large solar arrays is a monumental task, and Ecoppia's robotic fleet has proved to be up to the challenge. To date, the company has deployed its robots to over 35 large-scale sites, cleaning over 15.7 billion panels, and the water-free process is said to have saved nearly 1.8 billion gallons of water in the process.
The robots work at night, scooting across solar panel arrays with rotating microfiber cloths and flows of air to clear dust and debris before it can harden when it makes contact with morning dew.
"Depending on what area you're in, you can have different minerals that are deposited as dust on the surfaces," as Lin Simpson, a senior scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), explained.
"Once it goes through the cementation process, it can become much more difficult to remove to where even a strong rain won't remove it."
The annual energy losses attributed to soiled solar panels can be around 7% in areas of the U.S. and up to 50% in dusty areas like the Middle East, according to NREL data. Still, the costs for traditional cleaning can be prohibitive. A one-time cleaning for a 10-megawatt farm was estimated to cost about $5,000.
"If you brush the dust off these panels at a sufficient rate, it does keep them pretty clean and you don't get the cementation forming," Simpson added. "That requires you to clean them off every day or every other day or so."
Nightly sweeps by Ecoppia's cleaning bots help keep panels clean and ready to soak up the sun's energy without dirt getting in the way. They're also energy independent, running on their own solar charge, and share data to the cloud so their operations can be optimized through artificial intelligence, as the company detailed.
If we're going to reach our net-zero goals by 2050, we'll need to get 70% of our energy from renewable sources, as the International Energy Agency laid out, so every unobstructed ray of the sun is worth the effort.
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