Autonomous cleaning for utility-scale solar.
Soiling costs solar farms 5–15% of their energy yield. ARC1 is an autonomous platform built to recover it — cleaning continuously, day and night, at fleet scale.
Soiling is a permanent, compounding cost.
Every solar farm soils over time. Dust, pollen and grime accumulate on the glass and steadily cut output. Because the loss is gradual and invisible, it is easy to overlook — yet across a utility-scale site it becomes a significant, ongoing revenue leak. Manual cleaning is expensive and labour-intensive, so it rarely happens as often as the economics would justify.
Energy yield lost to dust and grime on panels in Australian conditions.
Documented losses in arid, high-dust regions such as the Middle East and North Africa.
People a conventional manual clean of a large site can require — slow, costly, infrequent.
Heavy soiling also drives thermal hotspots that can damage cells and shorten panel life. Figures are representative industry ranges.
ARC1 — built for utility-scale solar.
ARC1 is the platform we are developing to take the labour, cost and risk out of keeping panels clean. The principle is simple: let the machine do the repetitive work continuously, and let one person oversee many of them.
Its articulated cleaning head follows the tilt of each row, so panels are cleaned thoroughly without manual handling — the same job a crew does by hand, done consistently and on schedule.
Autonomous by design
A self-driving platform with an articulated cleaning head works the rows without an operator walking the field — taking the manual labour out of routine maintenance.
Around-the-clock operation
Built to run day and night, including overnight when panels are idle. Cleaning off-peak means no cost to production and many more cleans per year.
Fleet + remote supervision
Designed so one person can supervise a fleet across a large site remotely — the step-change that makes frequent cleaning economically viable.
ARC1 is under active development. Descriptions reflect the platform's design intent and current direction, not a finished, deployed-at-scale product.
Changing the economics of clean panels.
The goal is not a marginally better cleaning crew — it is removing the crew from the equation, so that keeping panels clean stops being a costly exception and becomes the routine default.
- — Large crews clean the field by hand
- — Slow, costly, done infrequently
- — Panels sit soiled between cleans
- — Manual work in heat, around live equipment
- + Machines clean continuously, day and night
- + One operator supervises a fleet remotely
- + Frequent cleaning becomes economically viable
- + People stay out of repetitive, risky field work
A fast-growing market with a permanent maintenance need.
Solar is being built out at unprecedented scale, and every panel added is another surface that will need cleaning for decades. Explosive growth plus a recurring, unavoidable maintenance need is exactly the market autonomous cleaning is built to serve.
Global utility-scale solar is projected to roughly quadruple by 2030 — no energy technology has scaled faster.
The addressable solar-cleaning market across Australia and the US is projected to grow past $600M.
Cleaning is not a one-off — it returns continuously, an ongoing operational cost at every site, for decades.
Figures drawn from industry research; a fuller breakdown is available on request.
Built by an engineer who knows the machine.
Spark Autonomy is led by Geoff Sokoll, a mechanical engineer with more than 30 years of industry experience. Geoff is carrying the ARC1 technology forward under Spark Autonomy, having acquired the intellectual property behind it, and is continuing its development directly.
This is an early-stage venture, deliberately run lean and hands-on. The priority now is proving the technology and building the right partnerships. If you are an investor, a solar operator, or a potential collaborator, the door is open.
Let's talk.
Whether you're an investor, a solar operator with a soiling problem, or a potential partner — I'd genuinely like to hear from you.
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