DUBAI // Irrespective of year-round sunlight, plans to make solar a primary energy source in the UAE are probably hindered by the all-pervasive dust within your atmosphere whipped up from the desert.
A real layer of sand renders solar panel useless, regardless of how bright, and how long periods, the sun shines each day. But a single one company could have the solution to the Emirate's green energy problems in the form of a constructed cleaning robot.
Nomadd has developed a durable, waterless cleaning robot which experts state "crawls" from one solar panel to another, conserving thousands of man hours and countless great deal more litres of water.
Already i would say the firm, which is based in Saudi Arabia, is either talks with several upcoming works in the region, including Dubai.
Georg Eitelhuber, acting chief executive, was a professor numerous King Abdullah University of Knowledge and Technology (Kaust), when he viewed for himself what happened to solar panel when they were caught in a airborne dust storm.
"Within a few hours they were dusty, " he said. "I knew that if there was to be a growth inside of solar in the Middle East, this would will be one of the key problems that would be resolved. "
Nomadd was started several years ago, with start-up costs using less than US$1 million (Dh3. 67m) and seed money provided by Kaust. The first working model of the bot was built out of Lego.
All the commercial launch of the Nomadd bot comes at a time when the solar trade in the region is beginning to boom.
In accordance with the Middle East Solar Industry Tv set, by 2020 there could be $50 billion dollars worth of investment in very new solar parks.
Last year Abu Dhabi opened Shams 1, a 100-megawatt solar park that generates all that is needed energy to power 20, thousand homes. Dubai, too, opened most important phase of a 13-megawatt solar the car, that once completed will reach the goal of one gigawatt of power.
The largest investments, however , are in Saudi Arabia, which generally aims to build 41 gigawatts benefits of solar parks by 2020 – the equivalent of more than 20, thousand football fields.
Mr Eitelhuber defined cleaning a facility of that overal size would be much more cost effective with automated programs rather than by employing "thousands of other guys with squeegees".
"The labour demand required to clean something like that is merely astronomical, " he said. "Plus you'd have to install a whole larger number of new desalination plants, using oil-based electricity, to make the water to clean these particular arrays. It's completely impossible. "
He said factoring in cleaning outlays for solar parks was usually overlooked in the rush to build more and more expensive developments.
"If a trustworthy dust storm hits you can be deprived of 50 per cent of the performance on this array in just two hours, " he said. "And that will winter months at 50 per cent until you washed it. If you can't clean 10, thousand football fields of solar cells everyday, you lose a huge amount of output, which quickly affects your end-of-year bottom-line margin.
"Add to that the uncertainty using labour costs over the next twenty years, in addition to water costs over 20 time. No one has a clue where the costs are going to go. Our marketplace case is that we'll remove everything uncertainty. "
Mr Eitelhuber defined the robots would cost about it $100, 000 per megawatt launched. They would be able to pay for themselves inside of three years.
A single robot can spider over a 400-metre row of conjoined solar panels, completing a wash of the particular size in about 30 minutes.
Of the challenges Mr Eitelhuber had to cured, designing a robot that could experience the harsh desert environment was the toughest. He quickly found that additional devices used in the US and The european countries just would not cut it.
The punctually design looks like a big, unlovely inhibit. But that was the intention, Mr. Eitelhuber said.
"What it comes from is a case of simplicity increasingly being equated with beauty, " a person said. "The fewer moving things, the less complexity you can bring about into it, the more reliable it will be.
"The more things you've got, the more things that possibly can fail. There're no exposed things because the desert will just munch on it alive. "
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