At this year’s Intersolar, CEO of SolarCleano Christophe Timmermans talked to Xtra about the company’s newest panel cleaning robot, the problems solar faces when the panel cleaning industry is overlooked, and the benefits of attending international events.
Interview with Christophe Timmermans, CEO of SolarCleano
“Now the current trend is that panels are becoming larger and larger and more powerful. Given that they’re becoming more powerful, the need for cleaning has increased.”
Xtra: Are there any exciting projects or collaborations in the pipeline that you can share with us?
Christophe: This year, we’ve come with a new robot called the L1. It’s a large utility-scale robot with twice the cleaning capacity of the robot we had before.
The robot you see in the background (of the video interview) is the B1, which we introduced last year and will present at the Demonstration Zone two kilometres away from the trade fair.
Xtra: What kind of conversations have you been having at Intersolar?
Christophe: Intersolar is very international. We see customers from all around the world who visit us and see the new robots we are taking to market.
It’s also an opportunity to meet new customers or prospects from all around the world. The solar industry is booming; we see it with the number of people who are attending the fair. This year looks really promising.
It’s only the second day, but the first day was great. We’ve [now] got many contacts from Latin America to Southeast Asia, and that’s promising.
Xtra: Why is it important to attend international solar events, and what are the benefits?
Christophe: Well, we do about 25 shows a year worldwide. For us, it’s a benefit because the company is relatively new.
We created the company in 2017, so we need visibility. We need to interact with people, we need to educate the market about the needs and the requirements of cleaning the panels. It’s not obvious that the siding is creating losses of production.
We are here with a bench of sales team who are here to educate people about the soiling losses, and what we can do in terms of [using] robots to mitigate that loss.
In a few days, we get to see people from all around the world: from very big EPCs to small cleaning companies.
For us, it’s a very great way to promote the brand and create awareness of us in the industry, and all of the possibilities which exist.
Xtra: What trends do you see shaping the future of the solar industry in the next five years?
Christophe: Over the last five years there has already been quite an evolution. Soiling was not recognised when we started, and every panel manufacturer would have said that panels would be self-cleaned. The success of SolarCleano demonstrates that this is not the case.
Now the current trend is that panels are becoming larger and larger and more powerful. Given that they’re becoming more powerful, the need for cleaning has increased.
The fact that they come to this area, which has now become the standard, is also creating problems that we did not have before for the [earlier] robots. We must apply pressure to the panel which is acceptable for the panel manufacturers, usually below 4000 pascal.
These are the challenges which are coming.
[Now] there are more and more tracking systems and different tracking solutions, so we need to adapt to the evolution of the market, and it’s quite fast.
This is a good opportunity to attend such fairs because we see the novelties from the panel manufacturers and the tracking system manufacturers. It gives us ideas of where the market is going and for our R&D team to continue to innovate and match these evolutions from the panel manufacturers.
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