As the price of solar panels are dipping, the amount of solar power being generated worldwide is soaring to all time highs. Yet solar still accounts for less than 2 percent of the world's total electricity capacity.
And small wonder. Each square meter of solar panel generates around 145 watts of electrical power, enough to turn on just two or three light bulbs.
That means you'd have to cover the Oberon Mall in Cochin 10 times over to match the peak capacity of a large fossil-fuel power plant. What's more, every one of those panels needs to be installed by hand.
Now companies such as PV Kraftwerker and Gehrlicher in Germany are developing mobile robots that can automatically install ground-mounted solar panels day and night, in all sorts of weather. PV Kraftwerker's robot is designed to assemble power-plant-grade solar panels, which are four times the size of the ones you'd see on a home.
For a 14-megawatt solar plant, the company estimates, it might cost about $2 million to install the panels manually. Using the robot could cut that cost by nearly half. The company says that the robot, which lists for $900,000, could pay for itself in less than a year of steady use.
PV Kraftwerker built its robot from off-the-shelf Japanese components. The machinery consists of a robotic arm mounted on an all-terrain vehicle with tanklike tracks. Suction cups grip the glass face of the solar panels and the arm swings them into place, guided by cameras that give the robot a three-dimensional view of the scene.
So far, the PV Kraftwerker robot can only do one thing: lay panels on a metal frame that humans have already installed. Two people walking along beside the robot screw the panels to the frame and make electrical connections.
Robots like these could be useful in bringing electricity to inhospitable environments. The government of Japan commissioned PV Kraftwerker to develop a version of its robot that could install a solar power plant largely on its own in radioactive areas near the site of the Fukushima nuclear-plant disaster. Gattenlöhner says the Japanese government wants the robot within six months.
PV Kraftwerker: http://www.pv-kraftwerker.com/en/
Gehrlicher: http://www.gehrlicher.com/en/home/company/videos/
