How to use robots to scale up existing climate solutions

The world emits 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year. To solve the climate crisis, we need to cut that number in half by 2030 and reach zero by 2050. For electricity generation, the United States alone will need to increase renewable energy capacity 10-fold over the next 12 years, which roughly translates to 400,000 new wind turbines and 2.5 billion new solar panels. To accelerate this progress, Congress recently passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes billions of dollars for clean energy projects.

As an expert, I think these dull, dirty, and even dangerous tasks are perfect for robots. However, there is a shortage of robotics experts to combat climate change due to a lack of awareness of necessary and urgent applications. Here is what I found: How to find opportunities to help robots make an impact on climate change.

The first robot I built from scratch was the SS MAPR, a boat for a water department to collect water quality data at multiple depths. This data can be used to monitor river pollution and control its sources. After six months of 80-hour sleepless hours, the SS MAPR was able to complete its maiden voyage and collect water samples and data from the bottom of the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania. This was an exciting moment for me: all the prototyping and coding was pointing toward faster and cheaper data access to drive regulatory action. I want to build more robots to improve the environment we live in.

After moving to the Bay Area in 2020, stunned by the raging wildfires, I started Nirva Labs to pursue opportunities in climate robotics. Surprisingly, many of the founders I spoke with echoed the view that there is a shortage of roboticists in climate tech. This is out of proportion to the huge potential of robotics to solve climate problems. My personal experience confirmed these observations — at all the robotics events I attended in the Bay Area, one of the largest robotics hubs in the world, I could hardly find anyone working on climate. According to investment data from tchBook, climate robotics accounted for less than 1% of total robotics venture funding over the past five years.

Why aren’t there more roboticists working on climate change? After talking to some of my peers, I realized that on the surface, climate change doesn’t seem to need robotic inventions—we already have most of the solutions in non-robotic form. But that’s exactly why climate change needs robots to do the repetitive work: to scale up existing solutions so that we can get to net zero in a timely manner.

Using robots to scale up existing climate solutions

To understand why robots are essential to fighting climate change, we should look at a similar case: the automotive industry. For a long time, cars were built by humans. In 1925, assembling a Ford Model T took an average of 3.76 seconds per part. That was the norm for nearly 40 years, before General Motors introduced a robotic arm to assist on the assembly line. Today, it takes about 2.04 seconds per part to assemble a Toyota SUV, a 46% improvement from a century ago, even as the complexity of the assembly process has increased dramatically.

This is where robots are best placed to free humans from repetitive tasks while increasing efficiency. Climate technology is in a similar state to the early days of the automobile. Most of the components of the overall climate solution already exist (e.g., solar and wind power, electric vehicles, heat pumps), but will need to be deployed rapidly and at scale to reduce 51 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. By doing what they can, robots can play an important role in accelerating the response to climate change by achieving economies of scale.

Finding opportunities in climate robotics

There are many technologically feasible opportunities for climate robotics to have an impact on the climate, but how can we actually do it? The best approach is to deeply study and understand the life cycle of existing climate solutions and determine how automation can accelerate it. But for any climate solution, it is important to pay attention to its overall impact on the climate: does it directly mitigate or eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, help us adapt to the impacts of climate change, or enhance our understanding of the climate? The overall impact involves not only the technological solution, but also the economic and political forces around it. Therefore, it is necessary to track the solution throughout its life cycle and fully understand the pros and cons.

Opportunities for climate robotics in renewable energy

The renewable energy sector is an excellent place to look for opportunities for climate robotics. Energy sources such as solar and wind are already cost-competitive with fossil fuels. Robots can help remove the bottlenecks that limit their expansion.

Starting at the source of the renewable energy value chain, robots can help eliminate labor bottlenecks in installing solar and wind farms. For example, one of the most time-consuming and dangerous tasks in building a solar farm is lifting heavy objects. Energy giant AES has developed an autonomous solar farm construction robot to solve this problem. The robot can automatically install solar panels on a pre-prepared foundation without workers having to lift. It is also three times faster than a human, and new solar layouts can generate twice as much solar energy in the same footprint. It's a great example of how outdoor autonomous navigation and control of robotic manipulators can accelerate the renewable energy transition.

X LABORATORY

Offshore wind farm construction presents different challenges, with installation typically possible from April to November, and the rest of the year being limited because of high wind conditions in the winter that make high-precision tasks like blade installation challenging. Dutch company X Laboratory has developed a motion compensation technology to keep the crane stable during blade installation, which could improve wind speed tolerance and thus extend the number of installation days to all year round. The team is currently refining the technology to compensate for disturbances caused by waves, so installation can also be done on floating vessels, rather than jack-up vessels on the seabed. This could potentially double the speed of construction. This is a creative and effective climate application that robust robotics can solve.

Additionally, renewable energy facilities require routine maintenance to maintain efficiency. With rapid expansion over the past decade, there is a shortage of skilled technicians. For example, inspecting and repairing onshore wind turbines requires hoisting a person 150 meters above the ground, which can only be done by trained rope access technicians. Many wind farm operators have to hire technicians from out of state at high cost, which drives up the overall cost of wind energy.

Many companies have also been trying to solve this problem through automation. Companies like Unleash are using robots to speed up blade inspections, while Aerones has developed a tethered drone supported by a rope system that allows for a larger payload and better stability. This expands the range of tasks from inspection to cleaning, coating and simple repairs. Sometimes, creative tweaks to existing robots can have a huge impact.

There are many more robotic opportunities throughout the renewable energy value chain. Batteries are an important buffer to renewable energy, which varies throughout the day. However, there is a shortage of key battery minerals such as lithium and cobalt. Companies like Impossible Metals are developing robots to mine mineral nodules from the seafloor to alleviate this shortage. At the other end of the battery life cycle, both academia (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) and industry (Posh Robotics) are developing robots to repurpose retired electric vehicle batteries, which still have 80% of their storage capacity at the end of their life and can be used for building energy storage. Robots speed up the process and reduce human exposure to toxic chemicals and high voltages.

How to Help

Learn about the latest climate solutions

For a bird’s eye view of existing solutions, Bill Gates’ How to Avoid a Climate Disaster and John Doerr’s Speed ​​and Scale are both great books. Follow channels like InsideClimateNews to stay up to date on the latest climate news. Join online climate communities like Work on Climate to meet like-minded people and learn what they are doing.

Join a Climate Robotics research project or company

If you want to contribute more directly to solving climate change, you can join an existing climate robotics initiative. Climate Change is an active community of (ML) researchers working on climate solutions. ClimateBase has a large climate tech job board for those who want to make a career transition. To learn more about related projects, check out the blog Nirva Labs for coverage of climate robotics founders and researchers. If you prefer podcasts, Hardware to Save a Planet interviews people working on climate change solutions that are not limited to robots.

Start with Yourself

If you’re ready to go deeper, you can also start a company or research project on your own. You can start by reaching out to climate practitioners and asking them how to scale the solutions they are working on. Try to fully understand their pain points before you start building anything. If there is already a robotics solution in a certain vertical, don’t give up on it! Reach out to customers who are already using it and ask them how they would like to improve it. Also ask customers who haven’t started using it yet and understand why. Often, there are many different customer groups within a vertical, which means that better alternatives or differentiated solutions will take up the remaining market share.