Innovative electrical and autonomous vegetation management in utility scale solar parks ( continuation project)

Important results from the project

The solar industry is growing rapidly and parks are covering ever growing areas. Thus, maintenance aspects are becoming increasingly important. The essence of the project lies in developing a competitive solution to manage the vegetation in a large solar park according to the wishes and eligibility requirements of the future customer. Development is focused on creating a electric and fully automated and scalable maintenance system for solar park vegetation. Machines are tested and verified in a real environment, where challenges are identified and overcome.

Expected long term effects

We have developed a good understanding of problems and needs that a solar park owner has regarding vegetation management, in relatino to both technical performance and other values such as biological diversity. The system has undergone major improvement in autonomous operation where the existing planning environment on the software side has been improved to adapt the system for long-term autonomous scalability. The system works stably during continuous autonomous operation and learns to handle situations and obstacles. This applies both to cutting around posts, and under panels.

Approach and implementation

The project has been located at a solar park in Skurup in southern Scania. The solar park in Skurup is about 30 ha and has an installed power of 18MWp and functioned as a demonstration and research facility under 2022-2023. We have worked with a dynamic model where mowing has been initiated when the vegetation has reached a certain height. The height for how far up the vegetation has been released before mowing has been set in relation to the mower´s sensors and objective based on the development of biological diversity.