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unhappycamper

(60,364 posts)
Thu Mar 27, 2014, 07:18 AM Mar 2014

Kibbutz Recruits 100 Solar Panel Robots To Combat Desert Dust

http://cleantechnica.com/2014/03/25/kibbutz-recruits-100-solar-panel-robots-combat-desert-dust/



Before the robots came: Ketura Sun solar panel with dust

Waterless (Almost) Solar Power Cleaning Technology From Ecoppia

Kibbutz Ketura was among the sites we visited on a recent technology tour of Israel hosted by the organization Kinetis, so we can tell you first hand that dust is a critical issue for a cost-effective solar power business model.

Aside from using as little water as possible, solar panel cleaning faces another challenge, which is to keep the panel surface from scratching.

Ecoppia’s E4 solution is a robotic device that deploys a soft microfiber combined with airflow, traveling on a platform that applies no pressure on the panel surface.

At Ketura Sun, the company’s fleet of almost 100 E4 robots can clean the entire solar park every night, which naturally leads to the question of how much power an automatic system like this will draw from a solar park, and whether that would require new storage facilities for night-time use.

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