Automation is becoming a structural feature of renewable energy development, with robots now performing tasks across every phase of a project. Advances in artificial intelligence and purpose-built hardware have expanded what machines can handle on a construction or maintenance site. Energy companies can now delegate hazardous or time-intensive tasks that previously exceeded the capacity of human teams alone.
That shift is most visible in solar and wind, where the pace of deployment demands solutions that manual labor cannot reliably provide. Finding enough trained workers to keep pace with the sector’s growth has become one of its defining constraints.
Rapid expansion in energy markets across the United States and other major economies has exceeded the available skilled labor supply. The Covid-19 pandemic was a forcing event for the sector. Oil and gas operators facing movement restrictions found on-site deployment impractical and turned to automation. That approach carried into renewable energy development and has intensified as the sector has scaled.
At its Bellefield solar complex in the Mojave Desert, AES turned to automated machinery from Maximo to complete a 100-megawatt installation. Each machine turns over roughly two dozen panels per hour per operator, at a throughput of approximately one panel per minute.
That represents a rate the company describes as approximately double that of conventional teams working the same terrain. Maximo’s president described the outcome as evidence that field robotics can now perform reliably at commercial scale.
A California-based firm called Civ Robotics has developed a different kind of automated unit aimed at the site preparation stage. The unit can place up to 3,000 precisely located survey markers in a single day, with accuracy that eliminates the need for follow-up correction. Achieving the same output with manual equipment would take substantially larger crews across multiple long shifts.
The company has placed over a hundred units with clients, the majority of whom work in clean energy.
One of the field’s leading specialists is a Japanese firm that has been developing wind turbine service robots since 2018. Its systems cover blade inspection, the analysis of aerial and ground imagery, and the application of protective coatings.
Turbines lose output capacity progressively as surface wear accumulates, and robotic systems respond to that deterioration faster than manual schedules allow. The company has found its strongest market in regions where maintenance labor is both expensive and scarce.
In 2025, Iberdrola of Spain unveiled a program using a four-legged autonomous unit for substation inspections. Onboard sensors are designed to catch equipment faults before they escalate into costly failures.
The broader rollout of robotic technology across the energy sector is accelerating, driven by cost pressures and constrained labor availability. How employment in the sector will shift as machines absorb more of the work is a question the industry has not yet answered. In the coming years, companies like GeoSolar Technologies Inc. are likely to weigh the option of incorporating automation in their operations as their client base grows and demands that teams deliver numerous projects simultaneously.
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