How Will ANSI/SEIA 301-2025 Standard Be Implemented and What’s the Best Case Scenario in 10 Years?

The approval of ANSI/SEIA 301-2025, the Solar and Energy Storage Operations and Maintenance Technician Training American National Standard, marks a big moment for the solar and storage industry. This new standard establishes more than training guidelines – it creates the foundation for a professionalized workforce that will ensure our renewable energy infrastructure delivers on its decades-long performance promises.

As Amicus O&M Cooperative CEO Amanda Bybee discusses in this SunCast interview from the NABCEP Continuing Education Conference, the industry is moving toward standardized O&M practices that will transform scattered, inconsistent maintenance approaches into a cohesive, industry-wide framework that maximizes system performance, extends asset lifespans, and strengthens grid resilience.

The true transformation lies not just in having the standard written down, but in the comprehensive organizational commitment required to bring it to life. As Amanda explains, successful implementation demands buy-in across every level. This multi-level adoption process may take a full decade to become the normalized way of doing business, but the payoff will be measurable: faster ticket resolution, fewer return visits, improved safety statistics, and ultimately, more profitable companies that can demonstrate the tangible value of structured training programs.

For those ready to be part of this transformation, the Solar PV and BESS Operations & Maintenance Tech 1 Training course from Amicus O&M Cooperative offers the perfect entry point. This comprehensive program, now available through HeatSpring, covers the foundational Tech 1 content including on-site safety, basic electrical theory, PV system operation, plan sets and schematics, essential O&M tasks, and more.

To watch the full interview, head over to SunCast Media.

Brit: Last question is – in a perfect world where everything goes the way you want it to, how will this standard be implemented and what will it look like in 10 years?

Amanda: Bringing a standard to life is a multi-step process. The first step is writing it down and getting everybody to agree on the words on the page, which is about where we’re at now. From there, it’s really up to companies to choose to adopt it. 

You have to have buy-in at many levels in a company to really truly bring this stuff to life. You need leadership to be bought in to say, hey, we’re going to do this. This is important. This is valuable to our company. This is valuable to our employees. We’re going to invest time and money into this. 

You need training. There are a number of new programs that are coming online and coming available. O&M training as a specific discipline is still a relatively uncharted arena. There are some new programs that are launching, which are exciting because they’re specific to O&M. 

But you can’t learn how to become an O&M technician by taking a single class. It needs to be accompanied by sustained on-the-job training. We are also trying to work with senior technicians to make sure they know how to be effective field trainers.

But you’ve really also got to have your HR team on board, because this needs to be written into your job postings, your job descriptions, your performance reviews, and your pay scales. To me, that’s a huge part of it, is making sure that the HR infrastructure exists to create accountability for people to continue with the training, to stay dedicated to it, and to continue advancing. 

But you’ve also got to have buy-in from the techs. From the techs who are in the training program to invest in their own future and to understand why this matters. From the senior technicians who are conducting the training, because many of them are great at what they do, but have never been trainers before. 

It’s really a multi-level buy-in that we need. It may take 10 years to really fully build this into the normalized way of doing business. I like to talk about operationalizing training, because we operationalize other things that we care about, safety and such. 

Everybody – when you say to a room who in here believes that we need to do more training – every hand goes up. It’s a universal intuitive understanding. 

But when you say, how many of you have structured programs? 

All the hands go down. 

That’s because it’s hard. A lot of the companies in our industry are small and they don’t have the wherewithal to create these programs themselves, because it’s time consuming and expensive to do so. That’s one of the things that Amicus O&M Cooperative and others are trying to provide is like, okay, look, we get it. You can’t do this by yourselves, but let us help you. Let us give you the resources. 

Once we give you the resources though, you have to be the ones to bake it into the day. The scheduler has to allow an extra hour on site for some dedicated training time. When everybody is hustling and trying to finish the tickets in a timely manner and get onto the next job, allocating that time itself can be a challenge.

It’s got to come from the top. It’s got to go all the way through the organization that we believe in this. We know we need to do this. And we know that we will ultimately benefit by having safer technicians who are more efficient at doing it, and ultimately making our companies more money, because we don’t have to do all the return visits and things don’t take as long. It really does all go together. 

My other big hope for the next 10 years is that we do a better job of tracking data around this, because it’s one thing to know intuitively that training is good from an attraction and retention standpoint, but I want to see data that shows higher trained technicians have faster time-to-resolution on their tickets and fewer return visits and higher safety statistics.

I want this to be rewarded and borne out in the data we collect. Hopefully 10 years from now we’ll be looking back and saying, yeah, the companies that invested in this stuff are really more successful by any metric.