Solar is growing so fast the real problem may no longer be building enough of it. The bigger challenge could be finding enough people to keep all those power plants running properly.
This week on the Net Hero Podcast I spoke to Hayk Harutyunyan, founder of Areg.ai, about AI, robots and the future of solar maintenance. But what made the conversation even more interesting was his background as Armenia’s former Deputy Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, where he helped take the country from almost no solar to around 25% of its electricity production.
Hayk told me the shift was not driven by speeches or slogans.
“What helped a lot was basically we started by de-risking the investment. We adopted all the necessary laws and regulations which would provide comfort for investors that they would get their revenue fixed. We did the mapping of the solar resource and we worked with the grid to allow connections from all of those locations.”
That planning brought prices down fast. “The first auction that we conducted was concluded in March 2018 and we got 4.17 cents and 4.11 cents. It was lower than small hydro, it was lower than natural gas and lower than many of the alternatives we were getting. The whole affordability issue just went out the window because that cost was lower than the average cost of electricity.”
Now Hayk is applying the same mix of policy, economics and innovation to maintenance. He told me solar plants may take only two years to build but then have to operate for 30 years and even small losses can destroy the business case.
“If you lose 10% in generation it might actually kill your whole project.”
That is where Areg.ai comes in. The company combines software, digital twins, thermal scanning and AI with robots that can clean panels, inspect equipment, control vegetation, tighten bolts and eventually tackle hazardous jobs.
Hayk explained the scale of the problem. “It took the world 50 years to build one terawatt and another 20 months to double it. Now every year we have 700GW of new additions and about half a trillion dollars of investment in solar. It is not a matter of wanting to save money on operation and maintenance. We simply will not have enough people to manage those parks.”
He is not trying to remove engineers. He wants to give them better tools and strip away repetitive work so the same skilled workforce can manage far more capacity.
This is a cracking conversation about how good policy creates markets then technology keeps them working.
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