Installing solar panels is hard work, so one of the biggest renewable energy companies is turning to robots to do the heavy lifting.
AES Corp. on Tuesday unveiled Maximo, an AI-powered robot that can lift and precisely arrange solar panels in long rows that will be used to build the largest battery-powered solar farm in the U.S. to help power Amazon’s data centers.
“We’re really focused on speed,” AES Chief Product Officer Chris Shelton said on a conference call with reporters. “And by speed, we mean speed for our customers, getting these projects online faster, and the speed of the energy transition. [solar] The more we can implement, the more we can reduce carbon across our economy.”
AES says Maximo can install solar panels twice as fast as a human and at half the cost. The robot has been tested in a variety of outdoor conditions in projects in New York, Virginia, Ohio and Louisiana, and has installed about 10 megawatts of energy so far. The solar farm AES is building for Amazon in Kern County, California, is expected to be 200 times that capacity.
Analysts predict there won’t be enough workers to keep up with the pace of automation. Demand for solar power is surging, especially now that the Biden administration is pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into renewable energy under the Inflation Control Act. In 2021, the administration projected that the solar workforce would need to at least double to 500,000 by 2035 to reach the national goal of 100% carbon-free electricity in 2035.
Amazon and other big tech companies are driving a lot of demand for renewable energy. They have ambitious climate goals, but they’re also building power-hungry data centers to store our data and develop AI. In some states, that demand is delaying the shutdown of polluting power plants.
Rapid expansion of solar farms and battery storage is key to keeping the company’s green pledges, but adding Maximo to the solar farm could also raise concerns that robots will bleak human job prospects in the same way that automation has replaced some factory jobs.
Ron Rodrik, vice president of project management at AES Clean Energy, said Maximo is not intended to replace human solar installers on the company’s projects.
“Maximo isn’t there to replace the panel installers or other workers on site,” Rodrique says, “It’s really about the safety aspect of taking away some of the heavy lifting that people have to do.”
AES Corporation
Lifting 60-pound solar panels repeatedly in the desert heat — sometimes as many as 200 panels a day — is physically demanding, and if that wasn’t a requirement of the job, Rodrique said a wider range of workers, including those with disabilities, would be able to apply.
According to AES, with Maximo, one person pilots the robot while another monitors and controls its movements with the push of a button.
The project with Amazon is just the beginning: If all goes well, AES expects Maximo to help clear a huge backlog of solar projects over the next three years, with data center hyperscalers being its biggest customers.
