Every day the dust settles on thousands of square kilometres of solar panels around the world, cutting the amount of electricity they produce. A robot designed by an Israeli start-up can autonomously clean rooftop solar panels that other cleaning robots can鈥檛 access, increasing the panels鈥� electricity generation by as much as 15 per cent.
Autonomous robots are widely used to clean large-scale solar arrays on the ground. Many work by sliding along rails to wipe dust, bird droppings and other soiling from 鈥渞ows and rows of endless鈥� solar panels, says at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. But these systems aren鈥檛 well suited for the growing number of solar panels installed at smaller scales on rooftops.
Nearly a installed in 2022 came from smaller-scale commercial or residential projects, many of which are on rooftops. Rooftop solar arrays tend to have lots of short rows, which makes installing a rail robot for each row uneconomical, and other heavy robots are difficult to get on roofs, says Kaminka. Rooftop solar panels are also arranged in irregular shapes, or at steep angles that make it difficult for robots to navigate.
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A new robot called Pleco set to go on sale later this year can autonomously clean such rooftop solar panels. Pleco uses a spinning brush to clean panels without water. The 20-kilogram robot has vacuum chambers on its underside that enable it to operate at angles up to 45 degrees, and could eventually be deployed聽to rooftops and carried between rows by a drone.
鈥淥ur vision is that the robot will live on the roof and will maintain it,鈥� says at BladeRanger, the company developing the robot.
Kaminka led the design of the robot and co-founded BladeRanger in 2016, though he left the company last year. He says they initially tested a drone that could lift robots and deliver them to panels, but the company shifted to focus on improving the robot first.
BladeRanger has been testing the robot at different solar installations over the past eight months, says Fruchtman, including on solar panels on buildings at Bar-Ilan University, where an early test showed electricity generation increased by 15 per after cleaning, says Kaminka.
Solar power generated a in 2022. It could have generated more: a December by the International Energy Agency found soiling 鈥� accumulation of dust and snow on panels 鈥� cuts total solar power generation by 3 to 5 per cent a year.
The greatest losses are seen in arid regions in the 鈥済lobal dust belt鈥�, such as the Middle East, the US Southwest and parts of the Mediterranean, as well as places with a lot of industrial pollution. Soiling is also an issue near roads and farms, whether panels are on roofs or the ground, says at the Fraunhofer Institute for Microstructure of Materials and Systems in Germany.
Ilse says the potential gains from cleaning are site dependent and there are still concerns that robots might scratch panel coatings, but billions of panels are cleaned daily by robots already on the market, including some that are solar-powered themselves.
