California-based startup Built Robotics has unveiled a huge autonomous construction robot that speeds up the creation of utility-scale solar farms — accelerating the transition to a clean energy future and making workers safer, too.
The challenge: Electricity generation is responsible for more than 30% of the US’s carbon emissions, so transitioning the grid away from fossil fuels and toward renewables, such as solar, is essential to combating climate change. Not only that, we’ll need to generate a lot more electricity as we increasingly electrify cars, machines, and industry.
To meet the demands of the future, automation is gonna be key in the construction world.
JUSTIN RUSSELL
Constructing a utility-scale solar farm is a major undertaking, though: once a company goes through the potentially years-long process of finding a site and securing permits, it can still take another couple of years to build the solar farm.
Moreover, as solar panels have gotten dramatically cheaper, an increasingly large share of the cost of solar power is coming from things other than the panels themselves, like construction and labor. If we’re going to keep pushing the price of solar down, we’ll have to get more productive at those things, too.
The construction robot: Built Robotics has now unveiled RPD 35, an autonomous construction robot that accelerates an important part of building a utility-scale solar farm: installing solar piles.
These heavy steel beams are about 15 feet long, and during solar farm construction, they’re driven about eight feet into the ground — the part of the pile that remains exposed then serves as the foundation for a solar array. READ MORE...
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