Good Drones Go To Bat For Low Cost Rooftop Solar

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Drones have been catching a lot of flak these days for one reason or another, but technology is often a double-edged sword. On the good edge, drones can help drive down the installed cost of rooftop solar power.

We’re emphasizing the “installed” part of the equation because recent improvements in solar cell efficiency have been contributing to the plummeting cost, but they only account for (very) roughly half of the installed cost of rooftop solar arrays. The other half involves so-called soft costs. That includes many things other than the solar hardware itself, and one of those things is the cost, time, and potential risk of sending actual people up onto rooftops for pre-installation inspection and evaluation.

Rooftop Solar Drones Good

That’s where the drones come in, and one good example just crossed our radar. The leading drone cloud software platform for commercial drones, DroneDeploy, is exhibiting at Intersolar North America 2016 this week with leading drone maker DJI in a newly announced partnership.

DJI is also known for its high tech cameras and thermal imagery expertise, so you can guess where this is going.

Although drones have recently begun to emerge on the scene, for the most part the prep work needed for a solar installation hasn’t changed much in the last ten years. Compare that to the skyrocketing increase in solar cell efficiency over the same time period, and now you can really see where this is going. Clearly there is room for improvement in the inspection part of the soft cost area.

The companies claim that their drone-centric measurement system with 3-D modeling could shave up to half the time it takes to measure a residential rooftop for a solar installation.

For commercial installations, the timespan shrinks from days to minutes.

With the thermal imagery angle, the partnership also anticipates that it can provide for more accurate, efficient placement of the panels. The system deploys DJI’s “Zenmuse XT” thermal camera to help installers identify hot spots more quickly and accurately.

Here’s how the thermal system looks when used in a firefighting training exercise:

The system is designed for ease of use, which also helps to chip away at solar soft costs by reducing labor training time. Apparently you just tap a couple of times on your mobile device (iOS or Android) to hook into the DroneDeploy cloud and the system automatically sends the drone aloft to capture data and translate it into actionable information.

The partners plan on marketing the new system for post-installation inspection and followup maintenance, too.

Other Drones Good, Too

Solar power is far from the only sustainability-themed application for drones. Some other examples come from the Energy Department’s cutting edge tech funding agency, ARPA-E.

ARPA-E’s Agro-Energy program, for example, is deploying both drones and robots to survey field crops, with an eye to improving biofuel crop yields.

ARPA-E also highlighted four “insanely cool” technologies at its annual summit last February, and one of them was a drone equipped with a laser-based methane detection system. The methane-sniffing drone  is designed to find leaks at natural gas well sites far more quickly than current human-based methods enable.

In the sparkling green future, natural gas wells will be few and far between, but that’s a long way off. In the meantime, the Energy Department anticipates that drone-based inspections could reduce methane emissions at wells by 95 percent.

Hold on to your hats, because DARPA, the Defense Department’s cutting edge funding arm, has an obvious interest in improving drone performance. This past February the agency completed the data collection phase for its Fast Lightweight Autonomy program.

The program lacks a clever acronym but it does deploy DJI’s Flamewheel 450 airframe to do this:

…explore non-traditional perception and autonomy methods that could enable a new class of algorithms for minimalistic high-speed navigation in cluttered environments…the program aims to develop and demonstrate the capability for small (i.e., able to fit through windows) autonomous UAVs to fly at speeds up to 20 m/s with no communication to the operator and without GPS waypoints.

Stay tuned.

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Images (screenshots): via DJI.