Changes are happening in how photovoltaic power is being installed, SunPower President Emeritus Richard Swanson said this week.

“SunPower has taken its experience in ground-mounted systems and looked at where the costs are focused. One of our responses to that was reducing our design time by use of the Oasis product, the 1 megawatt to 1and a half megawatt plug-in block with a lot things done like pre-cut wires,” he said.

The pre-cut wires reduce waste and labor from individually cutting each wire.

“That's going away with pre-cut wires. With these building blocks you know the length of everything. So the wires can be pre-installed. These help bring the balance of system costs down,” he said.

Over the past decade, robots, computers, GPS and other tools have increasingly been adopted into commercial farming. It’s also likely to happen in the solar industry, according to Swanson.

“Within a small number of years, large installations will be installed by automated machines. And we've seen evidence of that,” he said. “Bell Electric has now developed automated machines that crawl along the ground and place foundations, pile drive foundations and have the top of the foundation be within a centimeter of the design point, even if the ground is irregular.”

Another machine can install solar panels, Swanson said.

“That’s sort of the vision for gigawatt-sized power plants,” he said.

Photo: Chris Meehan / Clean Energy Authority.