Making solar projects cheaper and faster with portable factories

US-company Charge Robotics is developing solar installation factories to speed up the process of building large-scale solar farms. The company’s factories are shipped to the site of solar projects, where equipment including tracks, mounting brackets and panels are fed into the system and automatically assembled. A robotic vehicle autonomously puts the finished product – which amounts to a completed section of solar farm – in its final place.

‘We think of this as the Henry Ford moment for solar,’ says Chief Executive Officer Banks Hunter, who founded Charge Robotics with fellow Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumnus Max Justicz. ‘We’re going from a very bespoke, hands on, manual installation process to something much more streamlined and set up for mass manufacturing. There are all kinds of benefits that come along with that, including consistency, quality, speed, cost and safety.’

The founders say they were met with scepticism when they first unveiled their plans. But in the beginning of last year, they deployed a prototype system that successfully built a solar farm with SOLV Energy, one of the largest solar installers in the US. Now, Charge has raised $22mn for its first commercial deployments later this year.

Hunter says he heard from each of the largest solar companies in the US that their biggest limitation for scaling was labour shortages. The problem was slowing growth and killing projects.

Hunter and Justicz founded Charge Robotics in 2021 to break through that bottleneck. Their first step was to order utility solar parts and assemble them by hand in their backyards.

‘From there, we came up with this portable assembly line that we could ship out to construction sites and then feed in the entire solar system, including the steel tracks, mounting brackets, fasteners and the solar panels,’ Hunter explains. ‘The assembly line robotically assembles all those pieces to produce completed solar bays, which are chunks of a solar farm.’

Charge Robotics’ machine transports an autonomously assembled portion of solar farm to its final place.

Each bay represents a 40-foot piece of the solar farm and weighs about 800 pounds (363 kg). A robotic vehicle brings it to its final location in the field. Hunter says Charge’s system automates all mechanical installation except for the process of pile driving the first metal stakes into the ground.

Charge’s assembly lines also have machine-vision systems that scan each part to ensure quality, and the systems work with the most common solar parts and panel sizes.

‘We are hitting the limits of solar growth because these companies don’t have enough people,’ Hunter says. ‘We can build much bigger sites much faster with the same number of people by just shipping out more of our factories. It’s a fundamentally new way of scaling solar energy.’