In September 2026, the global PV operations and maintenance (O&M) market reached a key turning point. According to the latest Wood Mackenzie report, the global PV O&M market has reached 348 GWdc, an increase of 61 GW year-on-year. Against the backdrop of overall pressure on O&M costs, module cleaning demand has bucked the trend and become one of the fastest-growing segments.
Soiling Losses Force Cleaning Upgrades
The International Energy Agency (IEA) previously estimated that soiling erodes 4% to 7% of global PV power generation annually. In desert and industrially polluted areas, this figure is even more striking. The 1 GW Pugal park in Rajasthan, India, has written performance penalties into its contract terms — a hard constraint of 6 rupees/kWh, making “cleaning” a core part of power generation assurance rather than just an O&M option. According to Mercom India, Indian solar developers are accelerating the adoption of robotic cleaning systems to address the dual pressure of power generation losses caused by dust and the low efficiency of traditional manual cleaning.
Robot Cleaning: From "Novelty" to "Standard"
The latest developments in September confirm this trend. Ecoppia announced that its water-free cleaning solution was selected by Fortum for deployment in a 427 MWp project in India, bringing the company's operating capacity in India to nearly 2 GW. Market data also corroborates this trend. The global commercial solar panel cleaning equipment market is expected to approach 2.229 billion yuan by 2032, with a compound annual growth rate of 7.7%. The smart cleaning robot market is rapidly iterating around three major directions: "water-free operation," "autonomous operation," and "cloud collaboration."
A Paradigm Shift from "Manual Washing" to "Systematic O&M"
The deeper change lies in the reconstruction of cleaning logic. Wood Mackenzie points out that module cleaning costs continue to increase due to rising labor costs and profit pressure, while robotic solutions can reduce O&M costs by 40% and increase power generation by 6% to 15%.
As Mercom India concluded: as project scale moves from hundreds of megawatts to gigawatts, manual intervention is becoming "increasingly inefficient and unreliable." Cleaning, the "dirtiest" link in PV O&M, is being redefined as a high-tech intelligent service.
Recently, Multifit Solar's fully automatic cleaning robots have been exported in large quantities to India, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. They are widely used in large industrial power stations, covering various scenarios including ground-mounted and rooftop installations, with single-panel to six-panel arrays being the most common. Tailored to different array specifications, Multifit Solar has developed the MR-G model robot — a left-right cleaning device fixed onto the array — which supports remote real-time control via a backend network cloud platform. This solution significantly saves manpower, markedly improves cleaning efficiency and power station generation, and has won unanimous praise from customers.
Post time: Sep-21-2026