The Ultimate Guide to Becoming a LEED Green Rater As of June 2026, USGBC reports 16,239 LEED-certified and registered multifamily projects worldwide – accounting for roughly 2.1 million residential units, including projects certified individually and through bulk or batch certification. That’s just one slice of the LEED Residential portfolio,… Continue reading “The Ultimate Guide to Becoming a LEED Green Rater”
What Is a Ground Fault in a Solar System and Why Does It Matter? Ground faults are one of the more serious safety hazards in a PV installation. Understanding what causes them and what can go wrong is essential knowledge for anyone working on solar arrays. Janet Hughes has reviewed thousands of solar installations… Continue reading “What Is a Ground Fault in a Solar System and Why Does It Matter?”
New Course: Quality Fundamentals for Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) Quality teams that cut their teeth on utility-scale PV are now being handed battery storage scope too. The inspection habits that work on tracker rows don’t carry over cleanly, because the defects that cost the most on a battery project… Continue reading “New Course: Quality Fundamentals for Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS)”
What Fails First in a Solar System? Sean White on Equipment Lifespan When you’re doing O&M on a solar system, sooner or later something’s going to fail – the question is what. Is it more likely to be the PV module, the racking, the electronics like inverters, or something like a combiner… Continue reading “What Fails First in a Solar System? Sean White on Equipment Lifespan”
New Course: Materials Handling Safety Every construction project runs on materials. Lumber, block, conduit, racking, pallets of modules, cases of sealant: all of it gets lifted, moved, stacked, stored, and eventually hauled away. That work happens so often on a jobsite that it’s easy to… Continue reading “New Course: Materials Handling Safety”
Why Wire Management Is Still the Most Common Deficiency in Solar Installations The solar industry has grown fast, and that growth comes with a tradeoff. Contractors are under pressure to hire quickly and get people productive on the job site before they’ve had all the training they need. The result shows up… Continue reading “Why Wire Management Is Still the Most Common Deficiency in Solar Installations”
A Quality Defect Today Is a Safety Hazard Tomorrow on a Solar Site A lot of sites treat quality and safety like two separate departments, two different clipboards, two different inspectors walking the same row looking for different things. HeatSpring instructor Julie Stiglish thinks that split is part of the problem. In this… Continue reading “A Quality Defect Today Is a Safety Hazard Tomorrow on a Solar Site”
Celebrating Top Solar Nonprofits: Tribal Energy Alternatives This summer, a crew from Tribal Energy Alternatives (TEA) spent a month in Browning, Montana, about 25 minutes from Glacier National Park and 40 minutes from the Canadian border. They were there to build solar for Blackfeet Community College (BFCC),… Continue reading “Celebrating Top Solar Nonprofits: Tribal Energy Alternatives”
What Solar Manufacturing Can Teach the Job Site About Quality Most people who move into quality management learn it on the construction side, catching problems after they’re already built. HeatSpring instructor Julie Stiglish learned it from the other direction first. Before she was walking utility-scale sites as a quality leader,… Continue reading “What Solar Manufacturing Can Teach the Job Site About Quality”
Safety Pro – A New Badge for Jobsite Safety Fundamentals We just added a new badge to the Pro library: Safety Pro. It’s a bundle of four courses that each address a distinct and common jobsite hazard — material handling, falls, electrical work, and heavy equipment operation. It’s a broadly… Continue reading “Safety Pro – A New Badge for Jobsite Safety Fundamentals”
Going From Electrician to Quality Leader: Julie Stiglish’s Path Into QA/QC Julie Stiglish’s path into quality and safety leadership didn’t start in a classroom or a compliance office. It started in the heat of a Las Vegas summer, wiring up casinos as a journeyman electrician, learning what it actually feels like… Continue reading “Going From Electrician to Quality Leader: Julie Stiglish’s Path Into QA/QC”
Introducing HeatSpring Plus and Pro Starting this week, HeatSpring is updating how our subscription plans work. We’re simplifying the names, clarifying what each plan includes, and making it easier to see exactly which courses come with a subscription. Here’s what’s changing and what it means… Continue reading “Introducing HeatSpring Plus and Pro”
What’s New in the “Inside the Solar Executive MBA Data Room” Course The original Solar Executive MBA launched in 2012, and it was genuinely ahead of its time. There wasn’t anything else in the industry teaching solar development that way. Now Keith Cronin is bringing that same spirit of innovation to a… Continue reading “What’s New in the “Inside the Solar Executive MBA Data Room” Course”
New Course: Excavation Safety Training Excavation work is unpredictable by nature. Soil, water, and site conditions shift throughout a project, and the crews who stay safe are the ones trained to catch those changes before they become emergencies. HeatSpring’s new Excavation Safety Training course, taught… Continue reading “New Course: Excavation Safety Training”
Announcing A New Course to Help You Build Real Financial Footing Landing a good job in clean energy or construction is a big milestone. Managing that paycheck well enough to build real wealth is a separate skill, and it’s woefully undertaught. We built The Foundations of Personal Finance course to help… Continue reading “Announcing A New Course to Help You Build Real Financial Footing”
12 Moments When Utility-Scale Solar Quality Gets Decided Every utility-scale solar project is full of moments where a defect is cheap to catch and later moments where the same defect can cost ten times as much to fix. It turns out that many quality problems on a solar… Continue reading “12 Moments When Utility-Scale Solar Quality Gets Decided”
What Is a Solar Service Agreement (SSA)? Not every offtake structure looks the same once you leave the standard PPA framework, and state rules can change how a project is structured. We asked Keith Cronin, instructor of Inside the Solar Executive MBA Data Room, to explain what… Continue reading “What Is a Solar Service Agreement (SSA)?”
STC, NOCT, and NMOT: Sean White Decodes Test Conditions Used on the PV Module Datasheet Every PV module datasheet lists numbers like open-circuit voltage (VOC), max power voltage (VMP), and short-circuit current (ISC), but a module rarely actually operates at any of them. Differences in temperature and sunlight cause voltage and current to skew one… Continue reading “STC, NOCT, and NMOT: Sean White Decodes Test Conditions Used on the PV Module Datasheet”
What’s ASCE 7? Sean White on Calculating Wind, Snow, and Structural Loads When it comes to snow loads, wind loads, and other structural forces on a building, the International Code Council (ICC) codes give you a general framework. To run the actual calculations, like sizing a beam for a specific roof slope,… Continue reading “What’s ASCE 7? Sean White on Calculating Wind, Snow, and Structural Loads”
What’s the Most Common Fall Hazard Mistake – Even Among Experienced Installers? Ask any safety professional what worries them most, and the answer is rarely a hazard workers don’t recognize. It’s the shortcut they know is risky and do anyway. In this Q&A from our Competent Person Fall Protection Training course, Josh… Continue reading “What’s the Most Common Fall Hazard Mistake – Even Among Experienced Installers? “