While panels have become cheaper and more efficient, the way they are installed continues to be plagued by labour, land, steel and time bottlenecks, according to an article published by PowerMag. Solar plants are currently being touted as the future bitcoins for economies and the environment. As futuristic as the approach towards them may be, they still rely on a process that is extremely traditional. Teams arrive at the site, move structures and install thousands of components to make up a structure that can span hundreds of acres.
Planted just raised $31.8 million to expand a fleet of robots that work directly on solar park installation and launch a new generation of machines called Sage. It will use part of the resources to launch the Sage, its next-generation robot, in 2026. This transformation occurs in a market where the combination of generation and energy storage is starting to gain increasingly larger projects, such as the Chilean park of 165 MWp paired with a battery that could reach 925 MWh.
This is a gap that a California-based startup is aiming to fill. What has made the buzz, apart from the robotic aspect, is the interest of people in the project: Piva Capital and RA Capital Management Planetary Health led the investment, while Google , Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Gigascale Capital also participated. At its core, what the company is selling is speed and in this field, it matters. With the new funding, the startup plans to expand its robotic fleet.
10 months passed from the first contact to the power delivery, according to the company. It completed the Bowes Solar project, an 11 MW venture in Illinois for Cultivate Power, while another project managed to reduce its footprint by 10 acres after the original design was rejected by local authorities. As a result, areas that would be problematic for traditional solar trackers can accommodate panels.
Its structures are better able to navigate the irregularities of the terrain, according to the company. “How you design a system is pretty related to how you can get it permitted and interconnected,” Brown says. A typical solar farm uses long racks to hold rows of panels that move to track the sun throughout the day, squeezing the maximum amount of power out of each panel. But the design requires flattening the land to accommodate the racks, adding time and expense. The hillier parts of a site might not be used at all. Instead, Planted uses a separate post for each panel, so it can follow the natural terrain without changes. First, the company uses software to build a digital twin—a live virtual model—of the site and plan where each post should go. Then, it uses robots to precisely place each post, pulling them from a compartment that the startup compares to a giant toothpick dispenser. A custom bracket on top makes it possible to snap on a solar panel like putting together a Lego set. At the same time, Planted claims to be able to produce twice as much energy per acre, reducing the area occupied by the project. By building directly on the existing landscape instead of grading the land to flatten it, it can also make it easier to get environmental approvals. Vegetation stays in place, and stormwater flows the way it did before. The panels also sit lower, so there’s less visual impact on the surrounding area. Planted cites a recent project of 28MW, installed behind the metre to serve a neocloud type data centre. Even more impressively, the actual construction in the field took less than three months. The California-based company also pointed to smaller projects that add other advantages. In addition, it is preparing the Armoracia project, backed by Aligned Climate Capital.