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The Solar Workforce of Tomorrow Has Wheels
Leapting’s Autonomous Robots Signal the Future of Solar Installation
At a dusty solar site outside Culcairn, New South Wales, a tracked robot methodically rolled between rows of steel posts, hoisting large photovoltaic panels with a vacuum arm and placing them onto pre-aligned mounting structures. In the brutal Australian sun, where manual laborers need regular hydration breaks and safety protocols for heatstroke, this squat machine didn’t stop. It marked a quiet inflection point in the story of solar construction. The robot, built by Shanghai-based Leapting Technology, was not an experiment. It was a production unit doing production work. And it just replaced the output of a crew of three or four installers on one of the country’s biggest utility-scale projects.
The global solar industry has a speed problem. It’s not that we don’t know how to build solar plants, as gigawatts of new capacity are being added annually. The problem is the scale and velocity required to meet climate goals outstrip our ability to find, train, and deploy the human muscle to physically install it all. According to the IEA, the world needs to install over 800 gigawatts of solar annually by the early 2030s to stay on track for net-zero. That translates to hundreds of millions of modules every year. The act of moving a…
