More than 40 gigawatts of utility-scale solar generation were installed by 2023, according to Wood Mackenzie and the Solar Energy Industries Association.
That pace is expected to slow as incentives end this year, but even with modest growth, labor demand for large solar projects is expected to remain strong, as contractors consistently report that staffing remains an issue. In August, South Korea-based Xpanner launched its X1 kit, a combination of hardware and machine controls supported by artificial intelligence to automate one of the most demanding jobs on solar sites: pile driving.
“Typically you need a five-person crew to install batteries at a site,” says Henri Lee, Xpanner’s CEO and former equipment automator for Bobcat and Hyundai Infracore. Crews usually include “a surveyor, laborers, a marking guide for the piles. More than 70% to 80% of the pilots are run by two operators. One man is actually operating the machine with a remote control. The other is on the hook. There’s someone else looking at the number and quality of work done. We might get a total of five.”
By co-founding Xpanner in 2020, Lee sought to create site automation solutions that allowed project executives to be in the mindset of only answering questions like “how many people and how many machines do I need?” and brought a process-based solution to market, first with the X1 kit.
“I really wanted to shift that perspective from making an autonomous machine in the field to doing real process automation to remove people around that process,” says Lee.
Having more operators in taxis and fewer workers on foot in the field is an example of eliminating unnecessary risk exposure in solar projects.
Another common example, Lee said, was having four or five workers standing around a pile-setting machine while two different workers drove piles and moved the machine.
Designed for integration with leading stack controllers such as Vermeer’s PD10, the X1 Kit enables scalable deployment and automation. It is used by clients who are large EPCs on solar projects in the US
Michael Owens, head of the solar innovation team at Black & Veatch in Kansas City, Mo., is working with Xpanner on several projects in the utility-scale solar space.
“What it means is that we have fewer people in a work environment that can sometimes be dangerous,” he says. “There’s heavy equipment out there. The less people we can have working, the better. We’ve learned a lot of lessons. We had some things on one project that we had to correct. We’ve only used it on two projects so far, but we’re very excited.”
Owens says the X1 kit is an adjunct to existing pile-mounting equipment used on project sites and requires no special equipment to retrofit existing machines. It consists of three technologies: a proprietary software suite; Mango, a hardware control unit that facilitates machine operations; and M2, an on-board processing unit that can scan its environment and transmit operational commands in real time. M2 has machine learning capabilities that allow it to learn from every stack you place to optimize your work.
“They built artificial intelligence into our stack controllers where we just input our locations into our plan,” says Owens. “The pillar actually drives to the correct location. All the operator does is push a button on a remote kiosk. It’s not on the machine. Stick the stack, push another button. The pillar drives to the correct X, Y and Z coordinate. The elevation is there too.”
Owens says that while there was a bit of a learning curve on the first project, the difference between manual stack assembly, in terms of efficiency, was dramatic. “We had more people who had to be out there doing all these activities and then manually decide where that stack was at the end,” he adds.
While stack assembly and the X1 kit remain Xpanner’s focus as they continue to roll out the system, Lee sees more opportunities for automation of the build process.
“The core members of our company come from equipment manufacturers like Bobcat, Volvo, Hexagon and some from manufacturers like BMW,” he says. “The main motivation behind Xpanner is that we really want to eliminate as many people around heavy equipment in the workplace as possible.”
Last year, nearly 75 percent of fatalities involved heavy equipment such as trucks or cranes, according to OSHA.
