Kunling Equipment's AI Photovoltaic Cleaning Project Launches the First - round Financing of 15 million yuan.
36Kr learned that Kunling Equipment, a provider of intelligent operation and maintenance cleaning solutions for photovoltaic power plants, recently announced the launch of a 15 million yuan Pre-A round of financing. This round of financing will be mainly used for the system upgrade of the third-generation unmanned photovoltaic cleaning robots, the establishment and improvement of the operation and maintenance system, market expansion, and the construction of a robot production base with an annual output of 200 units, accelerating the implementation of unmanned operation and maintenance services for large-scale photovoltaic bases.
Kunling Equipment focuses on the intelligent operation and maintenance of photovoltaic power stations in extreme environments such as deserts and wastelands. Its independently developed desert photovoltaic unmanned cleaning robots have achieved all-terrain adaptability and all-weather operation capabilities. The product integrates an autonomous navigation system and multiple types of sensors, which can automatically adjust the body posture in complex terrains such as sand dunes and gravel. The average daily cleaning area reaches 40,000 to 50,000 square meters. Through high-frequency unmanned dust removal, its dust removal rate reaches 95%, helping photovoltaic power stations increase the average annual power generation efficiency by 10% - 20% and reduce the comprehensive operation and maintenance cost by more than 30%. Currently, the first batch of 8 devices have been put into testing at the "desert and wasteland" photovoltaic base in the northwest. Among them, 4 have completed the acceptance of the cleaning service, and the actual measurement shows that the power generation efficiency has increased by about 15%.
Currently, the installed capacity of centralized photovoltaic power in China has exceeded 800GW and will exceed 1000GW by 2030. Desert photovoltaic stations account for about 80% of the total installed photovoltaic capacity. Against the background of the accelerated promotion of the "desert and wasteland" bases, traditional manual or semi-mechanized cleaning faces three major pain points: the single cleaning cost is nearly one million yuan, the operation efficiency is restricted by complex terrains, and high-frequency cleaning is likely to damage photovoltaic panels. Kunling Equipment achieves a differential breakthrough with "all-terrain adaptability + full-process unmanned operation". Its robots can complete operations on soft sandy land and icy and snowy roads through Beidou centimeter-level positioning and AI path planning. The adaptive rolling brush equipped with lidar can save 80% of water while controlling the damage to photovoltaic modules at the lowest level in the industry. The actual measurement data shows that compared with manual cleaning, the annual operation and maintenance cost per GW of the robots is reduced by 20%, the cleaning frequency is increased from 3 - 4 times a year to 5 - 6 times, and the single operation cycle is reduced from 15 - 20 days to 8 - 10 days, effectively improving the power generation efficiency of desert photovoltaic power plants.
The founding team of Kunling Equipment consists of new energy industry experts and a special equipment engineering team. The founder & chief engineer, Zhang Chong, has led the research, development, and delivery of multiple national first-set equipment. The team members are outstanding talents from the University of Science and Technology of China, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, etc., and have the full-chain technical capabilities in mechanical system development, AI algorithm optimization, and electrical control. They are promoting the improvement of high-precision power generation power prediction based on multi-dimensional high-precision meteorological prediction and dust accumulation monitoring data, and constructing a dual-drive model of "equipment cleaning + power generation prediction", aiming to compress the power generation efficiency power prediction error of photovoltaic power plants to within 5%.
"The essence of desert photovoltaic operation and maintenance is to establish a deterministic service ability in complex environments," said the enterprise's technical director. Kunling Equipment has reached service cooperation intentions with the "Five Big and Six Small" energy groups, aiming to cover an installed capacity of over 50GW in the next three years. With the expansion of the scale of wind-solar-storage integrated power stations, the company is developing a robot matrix integrating cleaning, inspection, and security functions, aiming to become a full-life-cycle intelligent operator of new energy stations. At present, the team needs to accelerate brand building and production capacity ramp-up to cope with the first-mover advantage of competitors in the same industry. After the mass production base is put into operation, it is expected that the unit operation and maintenance cost will be reduced by 20 - 30%, and the electricity sales benefit will be increased by 10%, laying a foundation for quickly seizing the multi-billion-yuan cleaning service market for photovoltaic power plants.