US startup offers portable factory for ground-mounted PV plants

Charge Robotic’s portable factory system assembles solar equipment including tracks, mounting brackets and panels on-site and then puts it into place via an automated robotic vehicle. The company’s first commercial deployments are scheduled for this year.

US-based startup Charge Robotics has developed a portable factory system capable of automating the assembly and installation of sections of a solar park on-site.

The company, founded by alumni from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2021, says it is aiming to accelerate the transition to renewables by automating the most labor-intensive parts of construction.

Its mobile factories can be deployed to the site of projects, where solar equipment including tracks, mounting brackets and panels are fed into the system and assembled into a so-called solar bay. Each bay, representing a 40-foot (12.1 m) section of the solar farm and weighing around 800 pounds (363 kg), is then put into place by an automated robotic vehicle.

Charge Robotics deployed a prototype system, in partnership with San Diego-based solar energy company Solv Energy, which successfully built a solar farm last year. It has since raised $22 million for its first commercial deployments, scheduled for later this year.

Since the first deployment, the company says it has been making the system faster and easier to operate.

In an interview with MIT, Charge Robotics CEO and joint founder, Banks Hunter, explained the system leaves workers operating robotic equipment remotely “rather than putting in the screws themselves”.

“We can essentially deliver the assembled solar to customers. Their only responsibility is to deliver the materials and parts on big pallets that we feed into our system,” he added.

Hunter also explained that many of the portable factories can be deployed at the same time and could be operated throughout an entire day, allowing installation times to speed up dramatically.

“We are hitting the limits of solar growth because these companies don’t have enough people,” He added. “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.”