I was making a much narrower point above, just that there isn't additional overhead involved in shutting down for a day with our system, as opposed to sending hundreds of workers home which does happen today. Absolutely as you mentioned there's overhead in general involved with delivery, setup, teardown, and supervision.
And yes, as you said there is still the lost time value of money associated with any equipment that's not doing productive work.
Yes, silicon is still the majority[1], and it really just boils down to all-in cost. In watts per dollar thin-film ends up being reasonably competitive with silicon, but only because it's manufactured in the US which has steep import tariffs on foreign PV modules.
Yes! Sorry I explained poorly above, I meant there isn't additional logistical overhead involved in stopping operations for a day for robots, whereas there's tons when workers are involved.
You're dead on with regards to the logistics involved in operating this equipment on site, we'll absolutely be facing each of the challenges you mentioned.
Definitely, we've experienced workers being sent home for a number of reasons (too cold, too windy, too rainy, materials didn't show up as scheduled). Fortunately with an autonomous system there's no logistical overhead, if some external factor prevents us from working then we aren't stuck covering hundreds of per diems and sending everyone home. Yes, we'll have some equipment depreciation as it's not working, but it's at a similar rate to the rented or depreciating trucks/skid steers/telehandlers on existing sites when no one's working them.
Totally hear you on the CA vs MA weather swings (I've lived in both!). We actually see this as a key advantage for us. Sites we've visited in central CA have significant water distribution logistics, frequent shade breaks, and still have high heat exhaustion rates. Sites we've visited in northern climates report about 50% speed reduction in work due to gloves/cold, and will send workers home if the temperatures drop far enough. Our robots can handle both climates without an impact on installation rates (or any of the associated health risks for workers!).
Black Rock City's DPW for solar is a really interesting idea! Temporary housing is definitely used at times for more remote projects, but it's more expensive than just booking out all the local hotels (of course, once you've saturated hotel rooms you might not have the option).
Fortunately the labor needs are typically predictable, with each step you mentioned happening in parallel across a site spanning 100's or 1000's of acres. One of the main reasons that larger sites are particularly appealing for us is that the work done by our robots is continuously in demand somewhere, as opposed to a small site which might move in more discrete stages and have the rapidly changing needs you mentioned.
Absolutely. A couple that we're closely looking at:
Better documentation/data/insight into exactly what was built when, install rates, fuel consumption, and vehicle utilization during construction. Having our robots take a timestamped picture of every bolt that's installed is a significant win for construction companies in case any warranty issues come up after install. Currently there's not much visibility into exactly what was built where/when, so concrete data here will help significantly with scheduling/planning. We can actually generate a live updating map of the solar farm as it's being built.
Nighttime operation. Currently, all tasks on the site are performed during the day, so any amount of work we can shift to night time reduces site congestion. This actually can speed up the overall installation, as right now there's limited space between rows of panels, and multiple teams/vehicles trying to navigate through them simultaneously. We think of nighttime operation as analogous to parallelization as tasks that workers were waiting on can be performed asynchronously.
Reports are somewhat varied here but we find that about 10-20% of the overall site cost goes into labor. The bulk of the rest is component cost for solar modules and tracking systems, which are relatively commoditized and so are a thin margin above the cost of the raw materials to make them (silicon, steel). Those costs won't drop unless the underlying materials get cheaper.
We find that beyond the direct cost, the logistics of getting hundreds of people to a remote site is a significant challenge for construction companies. We directly saw how much of a hurdle this can be when we were on a site with the closest city an hour and a half away. Weather conditions are also a factor here, work on the site was actually shut down due to conditions that were too cold for laborers.
As we've interviewed solar construction companies, all of them have told us that they're turning down potential jobs just because they don't have enough people/capacity to build them. Unfortunately they can't simply raise their hourly rate by a few dollars to make this problem go away, because the challenges are more the regional specificity and logistical challenges of getting workers to sites.
We're operating as a subcontractor for existing large construction firms, where we come in and do the mechanical construction step.
In general robotics companies need to pick between "sell robots" or "operate robots as a service", and we've picked the latter model. Personally I think that throwing robots over the fence to a customer typically results in more headaches on both sides. Instead, we deliver mechanically assembled solar farms to construction companies, and they don't need to worry about how we got there - just that we did it quickly, efficiently, and spared them the staffing logistics.
Re:acquisition, we believe we can become a significantly profitable company operating independently. If we can become the best way of building solar, we'll be in a great position to sell services to all of the existing large solar construction companies.
Thanks! Great to hear from you (assuming I don't miss my guess from your username), hope everything's been going well for you. Looking forward to staying in touch as we make progress!
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, you're dead on.
I just finished routing an LPDDR4 bus (high speed + low voltage => worst case signal integrity) between two BGAs with signals routed on only 3 layers. The catch is that you need each high speed bus to be comfortably sandwiched between solid copper planes. Layers dedicated to reference planes start to add up quite quickly when you've got RAM, eMMC, ethernet, wifi, camera input, display output, SD card, etc all crossing over and through each other.
And yes, as you said there is still the lost time value of money associated with any equipment that's not doing productive work.