Robots for cleaning solar panels

Solar giant SunPower announced on Monday that it’s acquired a company that makes robots that clean solar panels. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the company, Greenbotics, is based in Davis, California, and its robotic cleaning products are mostly used on large utility-scale solar panel farms — the kind that SunPower develops.

Dirt and dust build up on solar panels can be quite a problem for solar farms. The efficiency of solar panels can drop significantly when they’re dirty. SunPower’s solar panels are some of the most efficient — manufactured at such a large scale — in the world at a record of 24 percent conversion efficiency. That’s about 50 percent more energy converted than typical solar panels.

Regularly washing solar panels can increase the energy output of a solar farm by up to 15 percent says SunPower.