The Operations Podcast with Fexingo · 2026-08-06 · 6 min
On this episode of The Operations Podcast, Lucas and Luna break down how a utility-scale solar farm in the American Southwest slashed its panel cleaning budget by 40 percent. They walk through the operational challenge: dust and grime can cut solar output by up to 30 percent in arid regions, but cleaning every panel on a 100-megawatt site is slow, water-hungry, and expensive. The farm ditched the uniform scrub-all-panels schedule and switched to a data-driven approach that combines satellite imagery, on-site sensors, and predictive weather models to decide which rows need cleaning and when. The result: fewer passes, less water, and a 40 percent drop in cleaning costs while keeping energy yield nearly flat. Lucas and Luna get into the specifics of how the team built the decision rule, why the first version overfit to one season, and how the playbook could transfer to other dusty industries. It's a tight case study in applying operations thinking to renewable energy infrastructure.
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