In the last few months, I’ve been working with a client, a small startup that develops robotic sytems to clean up solar panels. It is a pretty cool project.
I’m responsible for designing and implementing the algorithm to detect the dustiness level of the panels, and determine if it is beneficial to start cleaning up (i.e. returns on cleaning is higher than the cost of the cleaning operation). I’m also leading a team to develop the backend management and control system of these robots.
Solar panels manufacturing, and solar power plants are a big business in China. There are currently over 400 millions panels installed in China. And it is predicted that the total number of installations would double by the end of 2020.
Many investors found out that returns on investment in their solar power plants were not as good as initially estimated. At the cost of the current market price, building a one-megawatt power plant requires about 6 millions RMB in investment, and it is estimated that the investment could be recouped in 7 years, given the price of electricity and government subsidies.
Given that a power plant’s planned life time is 20 years, investors would have about 13 years of pure profits.
However, reality paints a different story.
With their current capacity to generate power, isnstead of the initial 7 years, it would take at least 15 or 16 years to recover their cost, if ever at all.
What happens? Well, the culprit is the dust. When investing in and designing the power plants, it seems that no one has given a serious thought about the efficiency of the panels when they are covered with dust.
Data collected from current running plants have shown that, panels that are left without cleaning for a month could lose up to 40% of efficiency in power generation.
Some plants tried to remedy the issue by hiring a bunch of peasants to clean the panels with brush and buckets of water. But most panels are installed on mountain slope, manufacturing facilities rooftop, rice paddies or fish ponds. They are hard to access, or downright dangerous to. Given that one person can clean up to 100 panels a day, when you have millions of panels, the cost is prohibitively high.
Hence, the great opportunities for automatic cleaning robots.