The U.S. has been building so many solar farms that companies can’t find enough people to install the panels. By 2033, the number of solar installers is expected to increase by 48%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Even if those labor force growth projections pan out, the industry is still likely to face a shortage of experts with the right skills. Making the work grueling — and unappealing — is the fact that a significant fraction of solar farms are in deserts.
“It’s terrible work in remote places,” James Emerick, co-founder and CEO of Cosmic Robotics, told TechCrunch. To give people a hand, Cosmic has developed a robotic assistant that does the heavy lifting on solar job sites.
Utility-scale solar panels can be enormous, weighing up to 90 pounds. Workers are required to hoist them onto racks several feet off the ground for hours a day. Such exertion in extreme environments can quickly exhaust a worker, or worse.
Those conditions are partly why Emerick and his colleagues started Cosmic. The startup’s robots shoulder some of the job’s physical burden, allowing people to focus on tasks that require more dexterity and intelligence.
Cosmic recently raised a $4 million pre-seed round, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. The round was led by Giant Ventures with participation from HCVC, MaC Ventures, and several angel investors, including Azeem Azhar, Aarthi Ramamurthy, and Nate Williams.
The startup’s robot is currently an eight-wheeled vehicle topped with a robotic arm and a slab of metal containing batteries and computer chips. It tows a small trailer laden with solar panels, and it charges at the construction site depot when the day is over. The arm is equipped with suction cups to lift the solar panels and cameras to sense the environment, while high-accuracy GPS helps the vehicle ensure it’s on the right track.
“We see this as a force amplifier, not taking jobs,” Emerick said. “There’s a certain physicality to it, and so bringing new tools actually opens the aperture for more people to actually be able to do this work.”
Cosmic’s robot can place a panel within a few millimeters of where it needs to be. Workers spot the robot, ensuring everything looks right before fastening the panel to the rack.
The goal is not just to lighten the load, but to speed things along, too. Emerick said that Cosmic’s robot could allow a standard crew to be split in two, doubling the amount of solar panels that can be installed in one day.
Currently, Cosmic’s robot, called Cosmic-1A, can install one panel every 30 to 40 seconds, which is about as quick as the fastest human installers. But the robot doesn’t tire as easily, allowing it to continue at that pace for longer. Workers still get to take their usual breaks, but there isn’t as much downtime from exhaustion.
By the end of the year, Cosmic plans to use its new funding to manufacture a few robots and have them operating in production environments, Emerick said.
The mechanical pair of helping hands is likely to be welcomed by data center developers, who have been rushing to secure electricity supplies in the face of skyrocketing demand. Solar has been a winner in the race to power data centers because it’s already low-cost and quick to deploy. Adding automation to solar construction sites would give solar yet another boost.
“There’s something new announced every day with data centers and energy generation,” Emerick said. “Speed of deployment is all that really matters. You just can’t build these things fast enough, can’t bring compute online fast enough. There’s a reason that data centers are measured in megawatts and not FLOPS or something, because that’s the critical piece.”
