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Think Roombas, but for photovoltaic arrays. @abrunvoll/Flickr With the price of photovoltaic panels at all-time lows, what’s a solar power plant operator to do to cuts costs and squeeze more electricity out of a multi billion-dollar investment? One word: Robots. Yesterday, SunPower, the Silicon Valley solar giant, announced that it has acquired Greenbotics, a California company that makes a solar-panel-cleaning robot called CleanFleet. Solar panels tend to get dirty. Dust and grime that builds up on a solar panel blocks sunlight, which interferes with electricity production. A big photovoltaic farm built in a remote sun-rich desert can have hundreds of thousands of solar panels sprawling over thousands of acres. For instance, the 250-megawatt California Valley Solar Ranch project SunPower built on 12,000 acres has 749,088 panels. Cleaning them two to three times a year is a labor-and-water intensive job. To keep reading, click here.
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The Key to Cheap Renewable Energy? Robots
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