The installation robot from Ozzie’s.
Installing huge utility-scale solar projects usually requires large field crews performing tedious tasks hundreds of times across many acres of land. New AI and robotics inventions are simplifying some of these job duties, sometimes replacing human workers altogether.
Companies like Moog Construction, the AES Corporation and Ozzie’s have all released new solutions that take over the most strenuous tasks of lifting and placing solar panels on miles of ground-mounted racks. The different solutions offer varying levels of autonomy, from assisting with lifting heavy panels to doing all the work themselves.
Moog Construction describes its robot CrewMate as a “semi-autonomous lift-assist” tool. The standalone CrewMate hauls panels around a site, then lifts and aligns them with the racking so workers can simply secure them and move on to the next module. The CrewMate completed its first trial installation with Montante Solar in fall 2024 on a capped landfill near Niagara Falls, New York.
“CrewMate is an innovation we believe can safely increase productivity and help meet the demand for new solar farms and workers,” said Steven Erck, VP of Montante Solar, in a press statement. “The PV panels in this field test are among the largest and heaviest installed by crews; CrewMate took the strain out of installation work that’s often done in high temperatures and remote areas.”
Heavy machine manufacturer Ozzie’s released a lift-assist tool in 2023 that uses a vacuum system to hoist and place solar panels. The OMH-40 attaches to six-ton excavators and can operate in up to 35-mph winds. Ozzie’s solution was also a Best of Show winner in Solar Power World’s 2024 Top Products competition.
The Maximo robot from AES Corp.
AES Corp.’s installation robot Maximo eliminates all of the human labor of moving, placing and securing solar panels on utility-scale sites. Each Maximo robot is operated by two people.
“Now all that they have to do is essentially just watch the robot, which is like a tool for them, and just click a button, and then the machine does it all by itself,” said Deise Yumi Asami, Maximo’s founder and member of the AES Next team that developed the robot.
AES would not disclose the number of robots it has, but Yumi Asami said Maximo has already surpassed 10 MW of installed projects and is targeting 100 MW by the end of 2025 with more robots deployed.
“For us to have an impact on a project, we have to have a fleet of those robots,” she said.
Worker shortages have long plagued the utility-scale solar space, with Wood Mackenzie and SEIA listing labor in its U.S. Solar Market Insight Q3 2024 report as one of the elements stalling future growth, along with interconnection backlogs and equipment shortages. Tools like these can drastically cut the number of workers needed on a site — particularly helpful for remote locations with a small labor pool to draw from. Replacing installers with robots can also lessen the apprentice requirements on IRA projects.
While automating the hardest parts of installations could be helpful as modules get heavier and larger, ensuring good-paying entry level solar jobs are still available for humans is still important if the green revolution is to benefit as many populations as possible. Yumi Asami pointed out robots like Maximo do create some new jobs, like routine robot maintenance and repairs as well as fleet management roles.
For Yumi Asami, Maximo is just the beginning of potential automation solutions for massive solar projects.
“Maximo is, I would say, just 10% of what I had initially envisioned,” she said. “I think there’s great potential for [automating] anything that is repeated activity, especially in this case, like heavy lifting. I think there’s great opportunity for adopting robotics in general, but I also feel like the overarching autonomous vehicles and platforms can help a lot with staging of the parts throughout the whole site. There’s a lot more that I think the solar industry will end up adopting in order to deliver more in less time.”
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