Iain Cooper, CEO of Renu Robotics, joins Sunny Ray to explain why solar vegetation management is ripe for robotics. Cooper describes how overgrown grass on remote solar sites can shade panels, jam tracker mechanisms, and spark fires. Drawing on a PhD in meteorology and 28 years at Schlumberger, including running its corporate venture capital arm, Cooper explains what building and investing in startups taught him about management teams, customer expectations, and board effectiveness. He details why he took Renu's CEO seat in June 2025 and why purpose-built robots, not repurposed lawn mowers, are finally ready for harsh, GPS denied solar fields with ruts, standing water, and fast growing vegetation. Cooper walks through Renu's land and expand sales model, the asset managers who actually greenlight pilots, and how a fixed per acre annual fee beats unpredictable manual mowing contracts. He closes on where the platform could go next, from air bases and airports to landfills, and his vision of a fully autonomous, data connected solar operations future.
Renu Robotics CEO Iain Cooper on why solar fields need purpose-built robots, not golf course lawn mowers, for vegetation management.
What is Renu Robotics and what problem are you solving?
Vegetation management is unattractive but critical. Solar sites sit on remote, poor quality land, and overgrown vegetation shades panels, jams tracker mechanisms, and can spark fires. With labor shortages and tightening insurance requirements around wildfire risk, the industry is ripe for robots, just like it's already embracing robots for construction and drones for inspection.
28 years at Schlumberger, then emissions monitoring, now robots. What's the thread?
I have a PhD in meteorology, so I'm fundamentally a scientist who likes solving problems with technology. I joined Schlumberger out of my PhD and eventually ran corporate venture capital, scouting new technology daily and figuring out how to adopt it into the oilfield and energy transition. That's where my love of clean tech and robotics came from, we made several robotics investments and I found it fascinating.
You founded Schlumberger's corporate venture capital arm. What did investing teach you about operating?
Executive team effectiveness matters enormously, and not all funding is good funding. Customers often expect a fifty person startup to behave like a hundred thousand person company, so managing expectations around free pilots versus paid revenue is critical. Sitting on startup boards taught me how financial management and board effectiveness work, and that boards should be additive through network, commercial visibility, governance, and experience.
Why take the CEO seat at Renu in June 2025 specifically?
I'd done robotics investments before but wasn't specifically familiar with this flavor of robotics, and I was a newcomer to solar. I was intrigued by what Renu had built and the harsh environment challenges they'd faced, which echoed my background developing technology for harsh downhole environments. I felt I could bring commercial technology development process to a company transitioning from an agile startup into scaling, and now we're expanding outside the US.
You said robots are ready. What specifically changed to make that true now rather than five years ago?
A lot goes into making a robot reliable even in what looks like a benign environment. Solar fields aren't golf courses, they have ruts, ridges, standing water, erosion, and fast growing vegetation. Robots don't like to swim, so you need geofencing, sensors for GPS denied navigation, and communication systems that switch automatically between cellular and satellite. Maturing all those peripheral technologies together is what finally made this ready.
What does everybody get wrong about mowing under panels?
People picture the pristine image of sheep grazing neatly at two inches. Visit an actual site and you'll see large patches of neglected vegetation, sheep sleeping under the panels instead of eating, and the dogs meant to herd them sleeping too. It's an environment ripe for neglect, and it's costly, especially when you have to call out an unplanned mow after a rainstorm that wasn't in the annual budget.
Where else does this platform go once the fleet and autonomy stack exist?
This is really a platform for personnel denied and remote environments. We've operated on US Air Force bases and run trials at international airports, where the FAA approval process is long, but demonstrating IT security has helped since nobody wants a hacked bot on a runway. Landfills are another market, operators have to measure methane quarterly and mow before surveys, which suits robotic systems perfectly.
If you look ahead three years, what does the ideal solar site maintenance model look like?
I envision fully autonomous solar operations and maintenance, with autonomous construction, drone inspection for hotspots like Raptor Maps, robotic cleaning, and us handling vegetation, mowing, trimming, and spraying. The real value is data. If you imagine a digital twin where these autonomous systems talk to each other through a standard data model, similar to what oilfield tool companies developed, that's the future across construction, operation, maintenance, and abandonment.
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