crossroads magazine It’s not so much about aesthetics, as it is about effi- ciency. “A solar panel covered in dust can lose as much as 30% of its output, a huge production impact when you’re operating at industry scale,” explains the CEO of SolarCleano Christophe Timmermans. “The more the electricity costs rise, the more important it becomes to consider the return on investment into PV plants, and so the cleaning needs to be better and better.” He came up with the idea to produce autonomous solar panel-cleaning robots after a sister company, Fallprotec, which produces height safety equipment, heard a client bemoan the tediousness of manually cleaning solar panels. “With the engineers we could rely on at Fallprotec, and our technical background, we sat down at the drawing board and created a clean- ing robot prototype that we took to the solar industry expo in Munich in 2017.” The response was such that the prototype very soon moved to the production line. Almost a decade later, Solar - Cleano has sold over 1,000 units in more than 100 countries. The secret to the company’s success is the relentless pursuit of improvement. “Our key selling point is the technology,” says Mr Timmermans. “Our research and development team must deliver one new robot per year.” Ideas come from unexpected places. One of the company’s latest robots was inspired by agricultural machinery used in vineyards. “We saw these tractors... and thought we could replace the vines with panels,” he says. The concept was adapted, engineered and transformed into a new cleaning solution – illustrating how cross-industry thinking feeds innovation. Standing out Despite Luxembourg being a small country with cost- ly labour, Mr Timmermans believes that being based here has contributed to the company’s success. “As we rely on top-class engineering that ensures excellent technologies and reliability of our products, we can promise decreased service costs for customers. This allows us to be competitive against similar solutions from typically less pricey Chinese or Indian manufac- turers,” he explains. What also helps is public support for R&D, both through direct investments and tax advantages, a sig- nificant factor in SolarCleano’s rapid international growth. But soft factors also play an important role when entering new markets. “It’s quite exceptional to have the country’s ambassador travel with you and pitch your business to local stakeholders,” he said. This was the case when SolarCleano decided to tar- get China, the world’s leader in solar energy production. The support of Luxembourg’s local representatives in setting up meetings with the right people helped Solar- Cleano to recently secure a contract to deliver robots for a large-scale solar park in a desert region of Xin - jiang, in the western part of the country. Bigger, wider, faster Given the solar industry’s rapid development, the com- pany now produces a wide range of robots – from small ones weighing less than 50 kilos, which can be carried by a person, to giants measuring up to 14 metres wide – to cater to different geographies and project sizes. “We produce roughly one small robot per day,” Mr Timmer- mans says. The company has built its success on a simple but demanding principle: continuous research and de - velopment. “The industry transforms itself at such a speed that you simply cannot rely on a model that you developed 12 months ago – to stay in the game, you need to innovate constantly,” he says. As in other indus- tries, AI is playing a huge role too. How do you clean a solar panel park the size of 30 football fields? SolarCleano, a company founded in Luxembourg 10 years ago, develops robots specifically to keep industry-sized photovoltaic (PV) parks clean. BY ZUZA REDA-JAKIMA