The Department of Labor has started accepting applications for energy training partnership grants. With approximately $100 million-worth of two-year grants up for grabs, hundreds of schools and for-profit providers are currently designing new solar installer training programs.
It may be a heretical statement, but we don’t need more solar training capacity as much as we need a wider pipeline to provide newly trained installers with on-the-job training from experienced installers.
A typical construction worker learns their trade first as a laborer/worker or as an apprentice through a co-op or union. Unfortunately, the solar industry doesn’t have an established training pipeline.
Normally, a market-based industry would solve this problem through supply and demand. The demand for quality installation service would be so high, and the supply of experienced installers so low, that the customer would pay a premium for the experienced firms. The experienced firms would then use this additional capacity to bring on new apprentice workers and expand their business.
The solar photovoltaic (PV) marketplace doesn’t obey this rule for at least three reasons:
1. The marketplace varies widely from region to region because of the different incentives and regulations in place throughout the nation. This concentrates experienced installation talent in just a few markets.
2. Increased competition and frugal customers exert pressure on businesses to reduce overall project costs, and there is little room to raise prices in the face of lower priced, lower quality competition.
3. Customer understanding of what “quality installation” represents is low. It’s easy for lower quality, lower price providers to remain active for quite a while before they “burn through” an area.
There are a few examples of on-the-job training models. A few community colleges offer programs for younger workers — however, they don’t pay much. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers also has a program that trains members to install solar over a two year period. But the majority of ready-to-roll contractors who are currently taking PV installation training have few options for gaining real-world experience prior to their first contracted job. As we build training programs to grow our installer pool we have the opportunity to provide field training on best practices and avoiding pitfalls you only discover after years in the field.
Established installers may respond that these new guys should “bootstrap themselves into projects,” just as most current installers had to do over the last few years. But why should they? Our society has a goal of installing one million solar roofs — and we’re only managing fewer than 30,000 per year now. With so many underemployed contractors filling up our current PV training courses, why not give them the field training and hands-on lessons needed to do the best job possible and succeed in their new solar installation trade?
The training dollars about to flow to the solar and energy efficiency industries should have strong components of field training and mentoring from very experienced teachers. Examples might include:
- government-sponsored retrofit projects that require a percentage of the installer crew to be new to the trade, filling “trainee” roles on the project,
- business models that recruit “innovator” clients willing to have their homes serve as installation practice for recently trained contractors,
- renewable energy training parks where various types of technologies can be re-installed over and over again onto various types of buildings in real-world construction simulations.
The bottom line is that it shouldn’t be such a struggle to gain PV installation experience from experienced installers, and the easier we make it, the sooner we gain a competitive, high-quality solar installation marketplace. As this is still a new construction trade we still have a chance to establish a new model for how “qualified installers” come into being. Let’s not front load the investment in classroom learning and then stiff the students on real-world, hands-on experience.
Or not. What do you think? Should the government provide funds to enable field training for new installers? Would this help or hurt your local solar marketplace?
