New Course: Utility-Scale Solar QA/QC Fundamentals

Julie Stiglish opens her new course with a story straight out of her own field experience: somewhere on a utility-scale site right now, a two-dollar defect is being installed. Nobody’s doing it on purpose. The crew is good, the weather’s fine, the part isn’t broken. It’s a connector that clicked, sort of, mated with a couple millimeters of gap that nobody had time to notice on the fourteen-hundredth connection of the week.

Catch it that day, she says, and it’s a ten-second fix. Miss it until commissioning, and it’s a five-figure troubleshooting exercise eating into the most schedule-critical weeks of the project. Miss it until year three, and it’s an arc fault, a warranty fight, and a bill with six zeros on it.

That’s the gap this new course, Utility-Scale Solar QA/QC Fundamentals, is built to close.

Who’s teaching it

Julie started in this industry onsite. Fourteen years at an electrical contractor in Las Vegas as a journeyman and master electrician, training apprentices in the field, and she still holds journeyman and master electrical licenses in multiple states. From there she moved into EHS and quality leadership, spending ten years at First Solar developing and auditing the safety management system across US and international projects, running root cause investigations, and presenting safety performance to the executive team.

Today she owns JS Renewable Energy Group, a consulting firm based in Arizona, where she and her team work as subject matter experts on quality and safety for solar, energy storage, and electrical construction. She’s installed the work, managed the risk, and answered to the owner and the regulator. That’s a rare combination to get from one instructor.

Her take on the subject is that quality and safety are the same discipline. An unverified connection is a production loss and an arc flash risk at the same time. Doing it right the first time is the cheapest and safest thing anyone will do on a project.

How the course is built

Instead of teaching QA/QC as a stack of checklists, the course runs on one fictional case study, Sagebrush Flats Solar, a 150 MW DC project with single-axis trackers, an independent power producer owner, and an EPC contractor. The defects, failure patterns, and hold points all play out on that same project, so the lessons land the way they would on an actual site rather than as rules to memorize. 

Module one turns that connector story into a rule. Quality management has a decades-old shorthand for it: the 1-10-100 rule, the idea that a dollar spent on prevention saves ten in correction and a hundred in failure. Julie’s point is that in utility-scale solar those ratios are conservative. The ratios run closer to one to a million. From there the module moves into who actually owns QA versus QC versus commissioning, and why blurring those three roles is exactly where defects slip through, along with a responsibility matrix for the owner, EPC, and subcontractors, and a map of the twelve specific moments across a project’s four phases where quality gets won or lost.

Later modules cover contracts, inspection and test plans, a quality management plan crews will actually use, civil and mechanical QA/QC, DC and AC/MV electrical QA/QC, defect management and root cause analysis, turnover and commissioning readiness, and more.

What you walk away with

The course consists of 8 content modules and about 4.5 hours of video lessons, backed by a working toolkit: an editable responsibility matrix, an inspection and test plan (ITP) template, a quality management plan (QMP) skeleton, mechanical and DC test log workbooks, a nonconformance report (NCR) form, a punch list tracker, and a turnover checklist, plus a capstone exercise where you assemble a real mini quality package. Like all HeatSpring courses, it’s self-paced and includes a year of access.

Enroll your team in Utility-Scale Solar QA/QC Fundamentals today!