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 clip, she breaks down why quality and safety come down to the same question: did the work get done the way it was designed to get done? A loose torque on a bolt is a quality defect the day it happens. Give it enough time, and it’s a safety hazard. A poorly mated connector starts as a performance problem. Left alone, it can become a thermal event. In both cases the mistake happens once, on install day, and only the consequences grow. The causes behind both are the same too: rushed work, unclear standards, and crews who don’t feel free to stop and fix something.

This idea runs through her course, Utility-Scale Solar QA/QC Fundamentals, where she makes the case that fixing the systems behind quality and safety at the same time, rather than treating them as two separate programs, is what actually protects both the project and the people building it.

Transcript below.

You say in your course that quality and safety are the same discipline. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Sure. Both come down to kind of the same question. Did the work get done the way it was designed to get done? A couple of examples: a loose torque on a bolt is a quality defect when it happens today, and then it could be a safety hazard tomorrow. My favorite is the poorly mated connector. It’s a performance problem at the very beginning, and if you don’t catch it then, down the road it can become a thermal event.

The root causes are the same. You have rushed work, you have unclear standards or weak verification, and people don’t feel free to stop and fix the work. For some reason, it’s easier to just move on and see if anyone catches it. If you fix those root causes, you improve quality and safety at the same time.

So if you separate them into two departments with two clipboards, safety on one side and quality on the other, you get gaps between them. We want to fix the systems. We want to make sure that workers feel emboldened to actually step forward and say, hey, I’m not sure this is right, can you take a look at this?

Want to see how Julie builds a quality system that closes those gaps instead of creating them? Check out Utility-Scale Solar QA/QC Fundamentals.