As the solar power industry continues to mature and provide an increasingly competitive solution to traditional forms of power generation, one problem has dogged site owners and PV panel manufacturers: in order to maintain peak power generation, panels need to be constantly cleaned to remove build-up of dust and dirt (‘soiling’, in industry speak). Under normal conditions, the build-up can impact power generation and the bottom line. In dust storm conditions, as are occasionally seen in the arid regions often favored for solar installations, the results can be critical. The solution until recently has been to arm a team of manual cleaners with mops and a lot of water, cleaning the panels as they can.
CEO Eran Meller
Besides being decidedly low-tech, this process is slow, inefficient, inconsistent, can harm the panels and – with consideration to water usage – extremely wasteful and expensive. Response time to critical weather events can take days, and at best panels can generally be cleaned every couple of weeks. It all amounts to a significant headache for site managers.
Enter start-up Ecoppia, founded by Moshe and Eran Meller. The two experienced entrepreneurs, between them holding over 30 patents (half of which resulted in products on the market), heard about the industry problem via an article in The Economist and assembled a team to build the solution. That solution took the form of the E4 cleaning robot – an autonomous, water-free cleaning unit that attaches to solar arrays and is managed through a robust cloud-based software platform and local master application, employing real-time analytics and predictive maintenance tools.
That was 2011. Fast forward to today and Ecoppia has worked with many of the industry’s biggest movers and shakers, including Siemens, EDF, and Arava Power. Sites using Ecoppia’s solution haven’t seen a manual cleaning in years. The technology has proved to be incredibly successful in decreasing cleaning costs, water usage, protecting the panels, and increasing energy production. Ecoppia, now commercial, is building on those early successes and moving forward with several deployments across the Middle East and India.
In a time when considerable energy has been expended to find a solution to panel soiling, Ecoppia has jumped ahead of the pack with a cost-efficient solution that is elegant and field-proven. Even more, the solution itself is solar-powered – during the day the cleaning units charge via their own dedicated mini solar panel and at night they operate via stored battery power. It’s clean energy technology’s clean cleaning technology!
In 2015 Ecoppia has gone from strength to strength, winning more contracts and moving into new markets. They’ve gained certification from many of the largest PV panel makers, including Trina Solar, Suntech Solar, JA Solar, and – most recently – First Solar, enabling the company to reach most of the largest utility-scale solar plants the world over.
Beyond simply being efficient, the solution has also been shown to be very durable. Passing where many other would-be technologies have failed, Ecoppia’s technology aced 100% of the stress tests performed by industry consultants PI-Berlin, standing up admirably to over 100,000 cleaning cycles – 40 years of simulated use – without failing or incurring damage to a single panel. The result is a hardy technology that’s reliable over the life of solar installations.
With the company’s accolades growing, the solar industry is beginning to sit up and take notice. Requests have been coming in from site owners and EPCs from all over the world, having been tasked with providing a simpler and more cost-effective cleaning solution. The result means that in 2016 the company will begin cleaning tens of millions of panels every month and see continued exponential growth.
All of which makes Ecoppia a rising star in the solar industry. Besides being the recipient of a Red Herring Award, CEO Eran Meller was recently invited by the Prime Minister’s Office to represent his country at the annual Conference of Parties (COP21) Climate Summit in Paris, France. He gave presentations that were attended by industry officials and delegates that want to know more about how we can decrease our impact on the environment while still meeting our ever-growing energy demands. With Ecoppia working to maintain the highest efficiency possible for solar installations, that future is looking brighter than ever.
