New Free Course: 10 Utility-Scale Solar Defects Hiding in Plain Sight

Every defect in utility-scale solar construction is cheap exactly once – at the moment it’s installed. After that, the price goes up. A missed refusal on a pile drive log, a connector that “clicked, sort of,” a bonding clamp that looks torqued but isn’t – each one starts as a two-dollar fix and, left alone, ends as a five- or six-figure failure.

That’s the idea behind HeatSpring’s new free course, 10 Utility-Scale Solar Defects Hiding in Plain Sight, taught by Julie Stiglish.

About the instructor – Julie Stiglish

Julie spent 25 years in electrical construction, the last 16 of them focused specifically on utility-scale solar. She’s the founder of JS Renewable Energy Group, an Arizona-based, woman-owned consulting firm built around exactly this kind of field-tested QA/QC expertise.

That background shows up in how the course is structured. Instead of lecturing at you, Julie hands you ten real annotated defect photos from an actual site and asks you to read them the way an inspector would in the field: photo first, answer second. You look, you write down what you think is happening, and only then do you get the explanation, including the mechanism behind the defect, and what it actually costs if nobody catches it.

The Downloadable Guide

Alongside the video, the course includes a companion dossier you can download and use immediately: a two-part guide covering the same ten cases. Part A gives you just the photo and a one-line prompt — what do you see? Part B holds the annotated answer, the failure mechanism, and the price tag if it’s missed. It’s built to be worked the same way in the field as it is in the course: look first, write your read, then check yourself against the annotation.

We’ve attached a copy of that guide here so you can start working through the cases before — or instead of — enrolling.

A Course for Utility-Scale Solar Quality Management

If you inspect, install, manage, or sign off on utility-scale solar construction, this is a genuinely useful hour. It won’t turn you into an expert on its own, but it will sharpen the specific skill the course is built around: noticing the defect that looks fine from three feet away.

For anyone who wants to go deeper, the ten cases here are drawn from a much larger 45-case dossier that’s part of Stiglish’s full course, Utility-Scale Solar QA/QC Fundamentals — but this free version stands entirely on its own.