Two Things You Should Know About the Michigan Solar Industry The Open PV Project ranks Michigan as the 28th best state for solar PV with 7.09 MW of installed capacity. Here are two things you might not know about the Michigan solar industry if you’re not spending a lot of… Continue reading “Two Things You Should Know About the Michigan Solar Industry”
Meet Tom McCormack, HeatSpring’s First ‘Student Advocate’ It’s no secret we’re excited about online and blended learning. Education is going digital – everyone knows it, but there’s a ton of fear and uncertainty about what that future looks like. If online training is the Wild West, then… Continue reading “Meet Tom McCormack, HeatSpring’s First ‘Student Advocate’”
How to Design Homes to be Solar PV Ready Many homeowners might be building a new home or doing renovations and they want solar, but not right now. The following is a guest post from Jamie Leef, an expert builder and solar installer at S+H Construction that will be… Continue reading “How to Design Homes to be Solar PV Ready”
Solar Executive MBA – Learn How to Model, Price, and Find Investors for Your Commercial Solar Projects Whose job is it to understand all of the numbers behind a commercial or utility-scale solar project? “That’s somebody else’s job,” is the response we hear from most people in the solar industry. We built the Solar Executive MBA for… Continue reading “Solar Executive MBA – Learn How to Model, Price, and Find Investors for Your Commercial Solar Projects”
John Siegenthaler and BNP Media Launch Online Course for Hydronic Heating Professionals: ‘Mastering Hydronic System Design’ John Siegenthaler is teaching an advanced hydronic design course this fall for 50 professionals. It’s a 10-week hands-on design course delivered on Cammpus software. BNP Media and HeatSpring Learning Institute are partners on the event.
Real Time Data on Actual Geothermal COPs – Part 2 of Lessons Learned from 100,000 Hours+ of Real Time Geothermal Monitoring Data This is a very nervous time for the geothermal industry and I can feel it when I’m on the phone with installers. There’s a lot of geothermal companies that have been around for 20+ years and now there’s a lot… Continue reading “Real Time Data on Actual Geothermal COPs – Part 2 of Lessons Learned from 100,000 Hours+ of Real Time Geothermal Monitoring Data”
3 Reasons Why Education Technology Is Needed to Save the World: Low Cost, High Speed, Very High Quality This is the first, in what may become, a lot of video articles. In some ways writing is the best medium for clear and concise communication (although I’m a poor writer), I also think are times when video is a… Continue reading “3 Reasons Why Education Technology Is Needed to Save the World: Low Cost, High Speed, Very High Quality”
Lessons Learned from 100,000 Hours+ of Real Time Geothermal Monitoring Data – Part 1 This is a guest article by Matt Davis, co-founder of Ground Energy Support (GES). GES provides a top quality real time monitoring package for monitoring geothermal heat pumps. Matt is an expert in geothermal monitoring. Matt has over 25 years of experience… Continue reading “Lessons Learned from 100,000 Hours+ of Real Time Geothermal Monitoring Data – Part 1”
5 Best Practices for Designing Online Courses This article is for businesses and instructors that want to understand best practices for designing online courses. It’s based on our experience training more than 8,000 students. Since 2011 all of our students have used online or blended learning. The… Continue reading “5 Best Practices for Designing Online Courses”
How Does An Online Learning Course Work? We can get a lot of questions about how exactly an online learning course works. This article outlines the 5 elements needed for an awesome online learning course. This article is for two people: Students that want to take a… Continue reading “How Does An Online Learning Course Work?”
[Proof Included] When and Why 100% Online Courses Are Better Than Face to Face Training The following is a capstone project completed at the end of a 100% online course. If you think online training courses are poor quality, think again. Read more in detail below. This article is for two specific people. 1. Students… Continue reading “[Proof Included] When and Why 100% Online Courses Are Better Than Face to Face Training”
What Every Renewable Energy Trainer Needs to Do to Stay Relevant My #1 piece of advice to all trainers for the next five years: create a digital version of your content. Do it now. Create it in little packets so you can deliver them in an agile way across a variety… Continue reading “What Every Renewable Energy Trainer Needs to Do to Stay Relevant”
6 Reasons Why A Course is a Better Online Training Tool Than Webinar Training This post outlines why, when you’re teaching advanced material online and you need to verify that the students have learned and implemented your material, courses are a better online training tool than webinar training. This article is from HeatSpring’s Online… Continue reading “6 Reasons Why A Course is a Better Online Training Tool Than Webinar Training”
50% Off Solar Training for Massachusetts Based Employees and Companies, up to $3,000 per Employee and $30,000 per Company This article is quick, but awesome! If you’re a Massachusetts company and looking to train employees on solar, you can apply for a workforce training grants and get 50% off, 3 HeatSpring trainings. This is for companies that need to… Continue reading “50% Off Solar Training for Massachusetts Based Employees and Companies, up to $3,000 per Employee and $30,000 per Company”
How We Financed a 13kW Solar Project on a Church in Massachusetts The following is a guest post by Fred Paris, the instructor of our Solar PV Installer Boot Camp Training + NABCEP Entry Level Exam Prep. Fred tells the story of how he worked with members of a church to finance… Continue reading “How We Financed a 13kW Solar Project on a Church in Massachusetts”
“If Banks Only Understood Solar, My Commercial Solar Business Would Grow” We’ve had over 800 people download our commercial solar PV finance model. If you haven’t, you can download the Commercial Solar Model here. When our readers, students and alumni download it, we ask them what the is the #1 obstalce… Continue reading ““If Banks Only Understood Solar, My Commercial Solar Business Would Grow””
Why Get NABCEP Certified? Is getting NABCEP Certified worth it? It’s the only game in town in the solar industry, but it’s not really required – it’s not a license. People ask me whether it’s worth it all the time and I don’t really… Continue reading “Why Get NABCEP Certified?”
Solar PV Web Marketing Practices Needed to Beat SolarCity + the Big Guys It’s clear that the bottlenecks to the solar PV industry are become less and less technical (though technical challenges still exist), and more about more about finance, sales and marketings. What does this mean? The companies that are the best… Continue reading “Solar PV Web Marketing Practices Needed to Beat SolarCity + the Big Guys”
Vermont Has the Most Progressive Solar Permitting Process in the Nation Until recently, Rachel Tronstein served as the Deputy Director of the SunShot Initiative at the U.S. Department of Energy. SunShot is a presidential level initiative focused on making R&D investments that will drive down the installed cost of solar so… Continue reading “Vermont Has the Most Progressive Solar Permitting Process in the Nation”
The Impact of SREC Value Assumptions on Commercial Solar PV Project IRRs Calculating the the un-levered (no debt), internal rate of return (IRR) of a commercial solar PV project is key to selling the project to the property owner, or gain investors on board for financing. If you’re still using the term… Continue reading “The Impact of SREC Value Assumptions on Commercial Solar PV Project IRRs”