The Future of Solar Construction: Automation, AI, and Reaching Terawatt Scale | EP278

Today on the Clean Power Hour recorded at InterSolar in San Diego, host Tim Montague welcomes back Matt Campbell, CEO and founder of Terabase Energy, to discuss the future of automated solar construction. Matt shares Terabase's journey over the past four years developing Terafab, their innovative "in-the-field factory" that semi-automates solar power plant construction.

Matt explains how Terabase is tackling the unique challenges of outdoor autonomy and robotics to achieve 24/7 solar construction capabilities. Unlike traditional automation that happens in controlled indoor environments, Terafab brings robots outdoors to build solar installations faster, with higher quality, and at lower costs. The conversation explores the technical hurdles of implementing robotics in variable field conditions and Terabase's vision for scaling to help the industry reach terawatt-level solar deployment.

The discussion also covers Terabase's broader digital ecosystem, including their construct platform (a digital construction management system currently used on 14 gigawatts of projects), plant predict, and SCADA solutions. Matt shares insights on how these digital tools are creating comprehensive digital twins of solar projects and helping improve quality, safety, and productivity across the industry.

KEY TOPICS DISCUSSED:

• Terafab's development journey and upcoming 100-megawatt deployment in 2025
• The challenges and solutions for outdoor robotic automation in solar construction
• Different approaches to automating solar construction (off-site prefab, on-site prefab, in-field robots)
• Addressing labor shortages through automation while improving safety and reliability
• Terabase's digital construction management system and its impact on 14 gigawatts of projects
• The path to achieving "penny-a-kWh" solar electricity

Suppose you're interested in the future of renewable energy construction, automation in solar, or how technology is helping to speed the energy transition. In that case, this episode offers valuable insights from one of the industry's most innovative companies.

Social Media Handles

Matt Campbell

Terabase Energy

Transcript

Matt Campbell: 0:50

So any sort of outdoor autonomy is uniquely hard. I think, I think it's taken us longer than we would have liked, and part of it is just the challenges you face with bringing this type of technology outside. But, but for us, it's inevitable that eventually solar power plants will be built with robots, and that is so we can do 24 hours a day, to build faster, to build with higher quality, to build with lower cost, and to really achieve sort of the terawatt scale. Hence the name of the company. We're trying to get to the terawatt scale as an industry, and you've got to do that through software and automation and AI. And so we think that the market wants it. The industry is ready for it. We're just focused on solving all the technical challenges to bring it to scale.

intro: 1:33

Are you speeding the energy transition here at the Clean Power Hour, our host, Tim Montague, bring you the best in solar, batteries and clean technologies every week. Want to go deeper into decarbonization. We do too. We're here to help you understand and command the commercial, residential and utility, solar, wind and storage industries. So let's get to it together. We can speed the energy transition.

Tim Montague: 1:59

We're here in San Diego at inner solar, and it's my great pleasure to have Matt Campbell of Terrabase back on the show. Welcome Matt. Thanks for having me. How you doing? Great man. We were just saying, it's been two years since Matt's been on the show. And I was asking, How long have you been working on Terra fab?

Matt Campbell: 2:19

About four years. Yeah, yeah. So

Tim Montague: 2:22

if you don't know, Terra fab is a video going on behind us, but it's a in the field factory that semi automates solar construction. So we're, we're always trying to bring down the cost of solar. This is a major thing in the industry. I think the holy grail for many people is a penny. A lot. If you can get Penny a watt electricity from sunlight, you can do a lot of cool things like green hydrogen, right? Absolutely, that's

Matt Campbell: 2:51

the goal. Yeah,

Tim Montague: 2:53

so, but give us a cliff notes version of where you've been on this journey for the last four years with Terra fab.

Matt Campbell: 3:02

Yeah. So we, we've been hard at work scaling Terra fab. So we've done a series of projects. We're still in the realm of pilot projects. So we we did a great one in Texas last fall. We're gearing up for our next two projects. So this year, the plan is to do about 100 megawatts. So it's still small in the scheme of a 40 gigawatt market, but to get to 40 gigawatts, you got to start with 100 megawatts. So we're excited. Yeah,

Tim Montague: 3:29

I heard from John Weaver, that we probably did closer to 50 gigawatts in 2024 Wow. So the market continues to grow and surprise us. And you know, there's, there's a couple of things we're trying to bring down the cost. We're always trying to improve safety, reliability and but labor is a major limiting factor. We only have so many, whether that's field labor or, you know, engineers, sales, people, finance, all forms of professionals in the industry are in short supply, but, but field labor is a tough one. Yeah. And so if we can automate aspects of site construction, that is going to be a good thing. I have a dream, and that is 24/7 solar construction with robots. There's always going to be humans involved in some aspects of construction, yes. But if we can automate more pieces of it, I think that's going to be good for the industry. And of course, you know, it's a national security thing, right? Being energy independent, it has national security elements, and it's, it's just a good thing. It cleaning the air, creating yourself for a safer, healthier future for humanity. Yep. So tell us, what are some of the challenges that you're dealing with and overcoming with terafab.

Matt Campbell: 4:53

Yeah. So you know, the basic idea of terafab is to achieve your vision. Our vision. Same is the same, which is automated 24/7 construction. Now, if you look at the field of automation, generally, almost all automation happens inside. So it's in a car factory and in iPhone factory, whatever it is. So the robots are living in a really friendly place, constant lighting, constant temperature, no dust, concrete slab, and we're trying to build stuff with robots outside. Never been done before. I mean, people are still trying to make cars that drive themselves. So any sort of outdoor autonomy is uniquely hard. I think, I think it's taken us longer than we would have liked, and part of it is just the challenges you face with bringing this type of technology outside. But But for us, it's inevitable that eventually solar power plants will be built with robots, and that is so we can do 24 hours a day to build faster, to build with higher quality. Be to build with lower cost and to really achieve sort of the terawatt scale. Hence the name of the company. We're trying to get to the terawatt scale as an industry, and you've got to do that through software and automation and AI. And so we think that the market wants it. The industry is ready for it. We're just focused on solving all the technical challenges to bring it to scale. I

Tim Montague: 6:12

will say I do notice a lot more robotic solutions here this year than last year. It's a noticeable uptick, and there are several that aren't here. I'm affiliated with luminous out of Boston. We were just there at their launch of the Lumi three. But AES also has a panel installing robot that's not here. It looks like a Zamboni. It's a weird thing. They don't promote it very much, but it's in the field. It's doing real projects. So your approach is quite unique, though, right with this assembly line in the field where modules get attached by humans to the torque tube and then, and the robot is partially involved in that, there is some automation of that, and then taking that torque tube out and mounting it with another robot, right? And that's a heavy lift. That torque tube weighs how much when it's fully loaded, can

Matt Campbell: 7:13

be up to 1000 pounds. Yeah. So, yeah, so, yeah, no, I think you're right. I think there's a lot more activity in automation now. I think we've seen a bunch of new companies emerge in the last year or two, which is great. We applaud all forms of automation. And really, when you think about automating solar construction, at least the core of it, the structure and the modules. There's three ways you can do it. You can prefab off site. So there's like a company, 5b in Australia that does off site prefab. We're doing on site prefab. And so you bring the factory to the field, you set up a Mobile Factory, you prefab sections and install them, and then you can do in the field, robots like a luminous or AES or others. We call that category the mod bot, so roving module robots in the field, which is an idea that's been tried for a long time, and I think is a worthy is a worthy approach. So, so, you know. So then the question is, which approach is going to win of these three? Or maybe it's not one size fits all, maybe multiple approaches. I think each one of them has distinct pros and cons. We've studied all of them in depth. We concluded that mobile prefab was a good way. But I love the mod bot too, and it's healthy to have a little, you know, try it from different approaches and and then run into the challenges and, but at the end of the day, it'll just come to throughput, quality, economics, capex, all these kinds of things. Yeah,

Tim Montague: 8:40

yeah. And you mentioned full self driving. You know, the electric vehicle industry, especially, Tesla is best known for this going after full self driving and, and Elon Musk is kind of famous now for promising an under, under delivering on that promise. Frankly, even I'm no longer a Tesla owner, but friends of mine are, and they're not, they're not too psyched about full self driving at the moment. Frankly, yeah, it's got, it's got quite a few problems on the highway. Is, it's awesome, right? If you're doing a long trip, it is pretty cool, but in town, it's another matter. And and that's quite telling, because that's a very controlled environment. Relatively speaking, a solar field isn't isn't crazy in terms of the variety, but there's quite a bit of variety of circumstances that a robotic vehicle, for example, is going to interact with I'm curious. What are your thoughts about that, and how automated is the wheeled vehicle

Matt Campbell: 9:40

at this point? Yeah, so we, we've already successfully tested an automated version of this vehicle, our delivery vehicle, and and we will be scaling that up next year, it, in some ways, is easier. In some ways, it's harder. It's easier from the standpoint of, I know where everything is. I've got, you know, fenced environment. I can somewhat control the environment. But there are going to be unique challenges, like, if if it rains and it's muddy and there's, there's a big puddle, a person would drive around the puddle, but you know, if you're following GPS routes, you're going to plow right through it. Maybe that's okay, but, but, or maybe I need to to navigate it right so. So I think there are going to be a lot of site specific challenges for anybody trying to automate different types of vehicles and solar construction, but they're all solvable engineering problems. None of it is like intrinsic like, there's no way I could solve that problem, and the speeds are low. So the thing that Tesla has to deal with is it's also like a highway is completely uncontrolled environment, like, you know, there could be, you know, and you're going 75 miles. An hour. When you're going 10 miles an hour, I can stop in a meter, right? So if there is a obstacle, you can, you know, it's a lot easier than 75 miles an hour, sure.

Tim Montague: 11:01

So you said you're hoping to do 100 megawatts in 2025, and and congratulations. That's, that's awesome. That's, that's a really impressive number. Let's zoom out for a sec in our last minute together and talk about the big picture. Obviously, Terrabase, it has some other divisions. You've got plant predict, you've got construct and SCADA. What would you like our listeners to know about the big picture?

Matt Campbell: 11:29

Yeah. I mean, you know, the growth in all of those products is fantastic. We're fortunate to have clients amongst all the most of the major EPCs and owners, so we're really excited. One of the really exciting thing has been the scale up of our construct platform, which is a sort of digital construction management system. And we've been introducing all sorts of new capabilities to track quality, safety, productivity, creating a comprehensive digital twin. And that, I think we're getting close to about 14 gigawatts of projects with this software. And so, you know, it's, I don't think the industry has ever had such a collection of of digital experience with construction. And if you want to improve it, you've got to understand what's happening today. So things like quality. How do I improve quality? Well, what are the systematic defects that need to be done better and addressed back in the design phase? So I don't end up with the prod the problem? So, so I think we're really excited by all of it. And of course, the big, you know, growth in the future is with the robotics, but it's but the robotics is really leveraging all the digital Foundation,

Tim Montague: 12:32

yeah, 14 gigawatts. That's That's awesome. Yeah, yeah, that's fun. I thought I was talking to CPS, they've deployed 10 gigawatts of inverters, and I thought that was a big number, but, well, thank you. Matt Campbell, CEO and founder of Terrabase, check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com. Please give us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify and follow us on YouTube. With that, I'll say, let's grow solar and storage. I'm Tim Montague. You.