It's not unfathomable that a cheap, automated method of doing this could be developed.
And that cheap, automated method will require energy as well. Perhaps a bigger concern maybe that such a method may require a cheap fluid to prevent damage to the panel coatings and that might be water, already a scarce resource in those places.
> Each of the 400,000 installed panels required one litre of water to clean. A 15 days cleaning cycle required 124 million litres of water (enough to sustain 9000 people) while rain in the Cholistan desert is rare and far between. Providing such huge amount of water in desert terrain, became a challenging and daunting task for management team. Besides, the manual cleaning methods allowed setting of dust before it was re-cleaned.
Some of their systems are already deployed in India. One example:
Site: Bikaner Solar Park
Location: Bikaner, Rajasthan, India
Capacity: 438 MW
Bikaner solar Park it is located in the north part of Rajasthan surrounded by the Thar Desert. While providing optimal irradiation, this geographic location poses great challenges in terms of soiling losses, which fluctuate between 17-25%. As such, it requires between 12-36 conventional wet manual cleaning cycles.
With the installation of Ecoppia’s E4 fully automated and water free cleaning solution, there was no longer a need to perform manual wet cleaning, saving billions of liters of water every year. Moreover, Ecoppia’s daily cleaning, significantly reduced soiling loses, maximizing the site’s productivity.