Sustainability is the new saviour of the world when it comes to saving the planet from pollution and contamination caused. The world’s dependence on renewables is swiftly increasing as a lot of globally countries continue to invest heavily in cost-effective sustainable energy solutions.
2021 will see widespread digitization at all levels of the power system, from production and infrastructure to end-user devices. Energy 4.0, as it is called, will enable the industry to implement intelligent energy and power management solutions based on machine to machine and machine to human interactions. As new technologies continue to emerge to meet the growing needs in the solar energy industry, one trend to look for is the use of machine learning, such as through microgrid controllers and artificial intelligence. New
software is further helping shape the future of how businesses can implement AI and machine learning in technology for solar energy. Companies in this sector are leveraging AI to identify and track trends in energy generation and consumption. Smart energy further helps forecast the achievable production of a specific wind or solar plant.
Digitally controlled robots and drones have gained much better popularity in the last decade. While the renewable energy industry relies on inspections and daily tasks to maintain safety standards to effectively power the world, it involves a great deal of time and human effort. Drones are being implemented to fly around in premises and quickly identify damage on everything from wind turbines to solar panels, thereby preventing potential problems before they escalate.
In addition, industrial robots are also being used for a myriad of applications, especially for cleaning and maintenance of solar panels. The two types of robotic solutions used for this are dry cleaning robots and robots using water for cleansing. Dry cleaning robots are more in demand because of their capability of saving gallons of water which would have been used for cleaning panels in the solar farms, these robots are preferred as it saves the planet from bigger problems.
The solar storage market is evolving rapidly in this time and will look completely different a year down the road. Batteries are increasingly being sold along with every new solar PV system being installed or purchased. 2021 will ring in the age of mass solar-plus-storage solution deployment trickling down to homes, industries, small and big commercial outlets, allowing businesses and residents to tap into the all new renewable energy which is more efficient, protects against outages, saves money and lives more sustainably.
New forms of storage like flow batteries are also coming to light that have a much longer lifespan . However, solar systems with batteries are going to be about twice as expensive as traditional grid-direct installations, so in that sense, we will see actual costs increase as the mix shifts toward batteries in general .