Robotic Solar Farm Vegetation Management with Tim Lichti

Transcript

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So we've, we're currently on seven sites. We have 17 robots operating across seven sites. Several of them are, you know, 500 to 750 plus acres. We're going to be doing a lot more robots next year. So if you are a solar asset owner or an O and M company or a vegetation maintenance company or a solar grazer that's looking to supplement with some vegetation, traditional cutting.

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Then reach out to us. We're happy to give you a quote.

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We're here at the solar farm Summit. I'm Tim Montague. Welcome to the Clean Power Hour. My guest today is Tim Lichti. He is the founder and CEO of Swap Robotics, a company that is tackling vegetation management on solar farms. Check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com Please give us a rating and a review and connect with me on LinkedIn. I love to connect with my listeners and hear your suggestions. So, Tim, welcome to the clean power hour.

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Thank you.

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Appreciate it. I always listen to your podcast while doing the dishes I mentioned to you before, so this is fun to meet you in person.

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I love that about podcasting, right? It's opened up a whole realm of content that before we just never would have been exposed to. Yeah, I listen to pods when I'm exercising, walking, driving, of course, entering the dishes or other chores. So it's a great way to fill the space and educate yourself. Yeah, I ran into you first very briefly at ACP a few years ago. I was young that we didn't get to talk more at that event, but here we are at the solar farm summit in 2024 in Chicago. Glad to see you here, yeah. But as I was saying in the in the pre show, mowing and agrivoltaics, I wasn't sure that that was a good pairing. So tell us about swap. What are you What are you up to? What is the status of the company, and why the agrivoltaics conference?

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Yeah, absolutely. So swap robotics, a little bit about us. We're just under five years old. As a company, we actually started in snow, but so we pivoted into cutting the grass on these 500 plus acre solar fields. We just, we kept on getting requests for it, and we're kind of like, why is this not a solved problem? And we, when we looked into it more, we figured out there's just so many unique challenges to cutting the grass in solar fields and vegetation, you need to be having a really thick kind of Bush Hog, like 50 pound plus blades to be able to cut through that really thick, nasty vegetation. You need to be getting all the way underneath those solar panels. So we developed the world's first and only offsettable cutting deck that can go six feet to the left to get underneath there. You might have some of these sites.

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You might have 100,000 i beams that you need to trim around every one of those I beams, and the trimming of the I beams can take as much labor as the cutting itself. So we have a trimming attachment that's available for that as well. And then you have a ton of safety features. So you need to be aware of where solar panels are.

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You need to have safety things like six emergency mechanical emergency stop buttons, sensing edges for Safety Sense, and all these kind of other safety elements to it as well. So we developed it our solution, just for cutting the vegetation on solar fields that has been our focus to date. We see agrivoltaics as a really interesting opportunity long term, and probably in 1015, years, where the industry is going to be. So what we discovered as we got into this industry was that actually managing the vegetation after these sites are built is the single biggest line item expense. So on some of these two, 3000 acre sites, sometimes they're spending over a million dollars a year just to manage the vegetation. That's a huge expense. It's real money. It's real money for sure. So that's historically been done almost all using people on riding mowers and skid steers. We thought that that's a great opportunity for disruption. We can do it more reliably, more clean, in a clean fashion, because our robots are 100% electric, and we we can do it more affordably for groups, ultimately bring down the cost of clean energy as well. We think that sheep can be interesting as part of the solution. Long term, you can start to take what has historically been the vegetation, which is a big line item expense, and over time, transforming that into some revenue as well. Now, of course, there's a lot of expenses for sheep. The costs are coming down for sheep, for sure, but there was that wood McKenzie study that was done a year ago that we're still finding that sheep is more expensive on large scale farms than regular equipment. I think that's going to come down over time, but I think that's what's really exciting, is that on that tenure perspective, there's an opportunity for sheep and robots to actually work together. And so what I mean by that is that sheep might be maintaining half the site, robots maintaining the other half, or some of it. It for there. And then one thing that we're happy to announce at this conference is that we are now working on an attachment for our robots. So it's not only cutting the grass and vegetation, but we will be able to use robots to actually rake that vegetation and then be able to turn that into hay long term. If that hay can then those bales of hay can be kept on the solar site. You can then have your sheep that can be basically, if there's drought or over winters, they can be using at forage without having overgrazing concerns. So that's, that's why we're

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here. Okay, yeah, so let's, let's talk about this robot. Yeah, it sounds like you've, you've custom built at least many of the parts is the entire thing a custom build, or tell us about that

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for sure. So individual components, like, say, gearboxes, motors, motor controllers, we use as much off the shelf as possible. That's so that we can scale up quickly as the we don't want to reinvent the wheel in terms of the form factor itself, though we've developed that ourselves, we actually didn't even want to or first, we want to use something that was out of the box, because robots are really hard, they're expensive. There was just nothing that actually matched our need for having something that's really compact yet also really powerful. So I mentioned how we started in sidewalk snow plowing, in that we needed to be fit on five and a half foot sidewalks, and we also need to be pushing snow 500 plus pounds for 16 hour shifts. So we needed to have that really powerful, yet compact form factor. Nothing existed on the market. We looked for it, so that's why we built it out. Now it just so happened that we just got lucky that that compact, yet powerful form factor works perfect when you're in solar sites where you might have 16 to 20 feet between the eye beams, and even the last ones you account for those tails, sure, yeah.

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And you mentioned being able to mow underneath and get to the to the I beams, yeah, you know, you're, you're reaching in, you know, four feet, basically right from the edge of the panel. Yeah, yeah.

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Yeah. And so is that a special attachment, or the mower is going underneath, or how does that work?

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Yeah. So that's a special attachment, and that's something that we developed in house. We have a couple patents filed already. We have probably six more patents that are kind of in the works as well. And that was one of those challenges. You know, this is you cannot be asking the solar asset owner to change the angling of their panels throughout the day, just so you can cut the vegetation. Just not an option. So we realized we needed to work around that. So our cutting deck at its highest point is less than 18 inches high, so it can get all the way underneath those panels. We developed not only the world's first and at least what is it?

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July 2024, at this time the world's only 100% electric Rough Cut deck that can cut through thick vegetation, but it's the world's first and currently only 100% electrical electric offsettable cutting deck. So our cutting deck can actually offset up to six feet to get all the way underneath those panels. And that trimmer attachment can now be trimming those I beams as well.

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Yeah. And the the system is a pure electric call it a tractor or a mower, yeah, and I noticed in the video that your battery is a swappable battery, yes, which, unlike Yeah, it gives you some flexibility there. But tell us about a typical installation, yeah. And how does charging infrastructure come in, yeah, for sure. Now, does that weigh in, so to speak, for

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sure. So installation is surprisingly easy. There's just two things that we would do on a typical installation. The first thing is a one time mapping of the site.

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One person can map about 40 to 60 acres per day. That's just doing it once, and then we have that forever. We include that as part of the cost per acre for our robotics service. So we charge on a cost per acre.

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That's the one thing. The charging infrastructure is pretty easy. The batteries are they kind of plug into a wall outlet 110 120 volt, 15 amp draw. We use a bunch of them.

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But typically that's able to be just take the power off of either the O and M building or the the electrical that's close by. There. Usually only takes from a few days to a few weeks to get that done, and then you're off to the races. We're ready to go. And in the meantime, we can even be cutting before that setup as well.

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But so is a, is a is a robot dedicated to a site?

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Is these are sites? Obviously, they're quite large, yeah. And so, yeah, it's running through and mowing but then it's starting again, yeah? And, or is it going to a container between mowings? Is it, yeah, and then has fast charging come up. Is that? Is there a need for that?

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Or,

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yeah, for sure. So something we talk about a lot, actually, internally. So right now, we typically follow what we call the Golden Gate Bridge model. You know, the painters on the Golden Gate Bridge is so big, when they start at one end, get to the other end, they go right back to the start. So we like to do some, you know, envelope math to say, Okay, how.

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They give this site, how many, how often do they need to cut and thus, how many robots do we need on that site to be dedicated? Now, it's not to say we can't do smaller sites. We can. And because these sites are typically kind of clustered together, there's that natural clustering effect. So we could do, you know, have some robots do a few sites and moving around if needed, but we prefer to do that. Kind of keep them on one site, and they just do it the whole season in terms of the charging, you know, I mentioned about the world's first and currently only 100% electrical Rough Cut blades. Well, those are 50 pound blades, so it uses a lot of energy to be able to cut through all that mass and that vegetation. That's why we do those swappable batteries. We can do a battery swap in five minutes. We do it ourselves as part of that cost per acre. We also do all the repairs and maintenance so to the customer, because whether it's the solar asset owner, whether it's an O and M, or whether it is a vegetation management company, they just know that they're getting the job done. That's the most important thing in terms of what we're thinking long term.

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We don't think that taking it to a charging station is probably going to make sense, because you would the amount of energy you need. You're talking probably level two or even level three chart charging that's needed.

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Well, we just don't think it makes sense to be setting up that kind of infrastructure in these rural areas where, frankly, that's the only thing it's going to be used for. We are considering, probably shouldn't go into too much, but considering some automated battery swaps, which you might see in a year or two, but the number still pencil really nicely, even just doing those manual battery swaps, right?

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Yeah. I

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mean, Neo has become famous for for swappable batteries in a consumer EV, right? In China, for sure. I saw one in Norway when I was there recently. Awesome. So they're coming into Northern Europe as well. They're not in the US market much yet, but we I know eventually, yeah,

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yeah. But

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so what is the range of the vehicle? You measure that in hours or miles?

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Or how do you measure the range?

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Yeah. So

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it's kind of the engineer's answer is, it depends. Almost all that energy is coming from those blades spinning the energy output. So it depends how thick the vegetation is, depends how fast you're running it through vegetation. Currently, you're seeing about five to 10 hours per charge. But we're trying to run the robots as close to 24/7 as possible. So a typical robot will have a couple sets of batteries so that while one is discharging, the other can recharge. And then, because those battery swaps just take five minutes, we want to run this. Run them as close to 24/7 as

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possible. Yeah, yeah. Cool, yeah. Well, I don't know what else I should ask, but, I mean, it sounds like you we've got some early adopters.

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Yeah. Can you speak about this, the scale of the operation? So yeah, and for sure. And what is it that you're looking for in terms of customers,

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for sure? So we've currently on seven sites. We have 17 robots operating across seven sites. Okay, several of them are, you know, 500 to 750 plus acres. We're going to be doing a lot more robots next year. So if you are a solar asset owner or an O and M company, or a vegetation maintenance company, or a solar grazer that's looking to supplement with some vegetation traditional cutting. Then reach out to us. We're happy to give you a quote. And then also, we actually are just in the middle of a fundraising round now as well. So there's room for follow on investors. We have the lead investor always ready, but room for follow on investment as

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well. Cool, yeah.

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And I'm just curious, like, in terms of the adoption, you know, obviously sheep grazing, solar grazing, is really taking off now. Yeah, Jr, Howard, who you introduced me to and said that, and now has a two gig watt solar grazing program in Texas now, and that's a lot of acreage, yeah, but what is the response that you're getting from developers and asset owners?

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Because it's clear that a hybrid approach is going to be necessary. JR fully admits, I mean, he's a sheep grazer, but he admits that he also has to do mowing, yeah? And there's just no way around that. Yeah, and I don't know all those details, per se, but, but what is the, what is the response you're getting, and, and, and, I guess are there, are there things that have to change in order to achieve wider adoption?

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So I think right now, all of our customers love it, and are looking to do additional sites for next year.

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So I think there's a lot of satisfaction there. We've taken a really intentional approach, not just to take on as much work as we can, but to make sure that every customer we're serving, they're going to be really happy with it and have a good experience. I think that's really important to do that, making sure that there's good customer support for these robots. And then in terms of the wider trend, you know, as solar utility scale, solar in America starts taking up over time, you know, millions of acres of land.

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It is a reasonable thing to say, how are we making sure we're not taking away farmland? And that's where I. See longer term, that raking attachment, that ability to basically make hay out of using the robots as something that's really special. You know, it's I don't think that folks are going to we've had 20 years to get really efficient and really good at making the current single access tracker setup for utility scale. I don't think that the way we do that should change. I think the equipment should enable hay making to work within those bounds. And that's why we've already been working on that form factor. You know, we have, I'm Canadian, so over 12,000 kilometers, you know, over seven, 8000 miles of autonomous operation just in the last year long. So we have a lot more experience than anyone else working within these solar panels, and I think we're the ones to bring that into scale as well.

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And the business model is robotics as a service, or are the companies buying the robots? Robotics

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as a service? But the way we describe it is just a cost per acre per cut, which is how folks are used to seeing it already. So it's a really easy thing to say yes to and

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these sites that you're working today geographically, approximately where, where are we talking Yeah.

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So we have a few in Texas. We've got some in North Carolina, some in Georgia. We've worked in Florida. Next year, in 2025 we're going to be working a lot in the Midwest as well. So wherever solar is really being built out, we want to be there in

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USA. Yeah, and is there an average that you see how many times does a site need to be mowed in a season?

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It really totally depends on the environment. The biggest determinant of that is just how many inches of rainfall you get. That's going to determine how often you need to cut. In an area like West Texas, you might only need couple cuts a year more central Texas and the Texas triangle, you know, three to five times, even six, if it's a wet rain, like, like Jr said beforehand, right?

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Getting into, you know, North Carolina and Georgia, four or five cuts a year. Getting to Florida, you might be doing 810, even 12 cuts a year, just because they get a lot of rain there. And it's some areas you're having to cut the entire year as well. Makes

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sense. Is there anything else our listeners should know about swap robotics?

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No, I think just reach out to us sales at swap robotics if you're interested in getting quotes and learning more cool.

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Well, thank you.

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Tim Lichti, awesome with swap robotics. I'm Tim Montague.

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Check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com. Please give us a rating and a review on Apple or Spotify. Tell your friends about the show and reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love hearing from my listeners on LinkedIn. With that, I'll say, let's grow solar grazing, take care. Bye.

Robotic Solar Farm Vegetation Management with Tim Lichti | EP229

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