New Course: SCADA Communication Systems for Utility-Scale Solar

The U.S. added 34.7 GW of utility-scale solar capacity in 2025, according to SEIA and Wood Mackenzie’s Solar Market Insight Year in Review. That’s a lot of plants being commissioned, handed over, and turned over to O&M teams, many of whom will inherit a SCADA system they’ve never been trained on.

SCADA is the technology that connects a field full of inverters, trackers, and meters into a single operating picture. It’s the system that gives an owner the ability to monitor, control, and optimize their plant for the next 25 years. Despite that, it often gets less attention during construction planning than it deserves.

A misconfigured point list or an incorrectly scaled measurement doesn’t stay contained to the commissioning checklist. It shows up in performance reports, availability calculations, and every operational decision the owner makes for the next 25 years.

That’s why we partnered with Andy Nyce and Connor Krening to build “SCADA Communication Systems for Utility-Scale Solar.”

What’s in the Course

The course is organized around how a SCADA system actually gets built and handed over on a utility-scale project: architecture first, then configuration, then commissioning.

The first lesson covers communications architecture – how devices talk to each other, which protocols are used and why, and how the network is structured from string-level monitoring through to the utility interface. This is the foundation. Without it, the rest of SCADA configuration is hard to understand.

The second lesson goes deep on SCADA configuration itself: point lists, scaling factors, alarm setpoints, data historians, and the control functions that an operations team will rely on every single day. This is where errors tend to hide. A scaling factor that’s off by a factor of ten, or an alarm threshold that was never set correctly, can quietly distort performance data for months before anyone catches it.

The third lesson covers SCADA commissioning – how you verify that every device is communicating correctly, how you test control functions end-to-end, and how you set up the system so the O&M team inherits something they can actually use.

The course is self-paced, 1–2 hours of content, with access to the instructors on the discussion board throughout your 12 months of enrollment.

Meet Your Instructors

Andy Nyce is Sr. Director of Project Management at Erthos Inc. Originally from New Zealand, he’s spent nine years in the U.S. working across engineering, construction, project management, and quality control in large-scale renewables – with direct involvement in over 2 GW of utility-scale solar execution at every level of installation, management, and commissioning.

Connor Krening is a Registered Electrical Professional Engineer with a decade of experience in solar, focused specifically on SCADA design, commissioning, and energy modeling for the past six years. He’s contributed to the engineering and construction of dozens of utility-scale solar power plants currently operating across the country.

Together, they bring a practical, applied perspective to a topic that’s usually learned on the job.

Who This Course Is For

This course was built for anyone involved in the design, construction, commissioning, or operation of utility-scale solar projects who wants to understand SCADA at a practical level. That includes people moving from residential or commercial solar into utility-scale work, where SCADA is a system they’re likely encountering for the first time.

Enroll Today

If you work on utility-scale solar projects and want a structured foundation for understanding how SCADA actually works, this is a great place to start.

Enroll in “SCADA Communication Systems for Utility-Scale Solar” here!