Solar Safety: Risks During Construction Versus Operations

The transition from solar construction to operations brings fundamentally different safety challenges that you and your team need to understand. These two video clips from Andy Nyce’s “Introduction to Utility-Scale Solar Operations & Maintenance” course highlight that what keeps workers safe during construction may not be enough once a solar facility goes live.

During construction, teams face immediate physical hazards, things like slips and falls on muddy terrain, equipment collisions in tight spaces, and lacerations from sharp materials. But once energization occurs, the safety landscape transforms entirely. Electrical hazards become the dominant concern, while the daily familiarity of O&M work can breed dangerous complacency.

This is where recordable injuries become more than just statistics. They’re indicators of whether our company’s safety systems are truly protecting our team’s health and safety. When we track metrics like the Recordable Incident Rate (RIR), we’re measuring our success at preventing life-altering injuries: fatalities, permanent disabilities, lost workdays, and serious medical events that go beyond basic first aid. 

Understanding these evolving risks and the proper safety measures for each phase of a project’s lifecycle is exactly why comprehensive training in solar O&M is essential.

The “Introduction to Utility-Scale Solar Operations & Maintenance” course is included in the Solar Service PRO badge in the new HeatSpring PRO. Sign up today to unlock this course and 15 others!

Transcripts below. 

Before energization occurs, the major safety risks on a solar construction site are slips, trips, and falls, especially if the site is muddy or wet or you have personnel working around open underground trenches. Traffic or equipment incidents. Since there are skid steers, trucks, buggies, forklifts, and other heavy equipment, all operating sometimes in fairly tight spaces, there’s a high risk of collision or injury here. You need to ensure that your ground crews are making eye contact with any equipment operators, speeds are maintained, and all personnel are properly trained and licensed. The possibility of lacerations from posts, racking, modules, or even some electrical equipment is very high as well. Many companies enforced a need for cut sleeves when working on modules or racking crews on top of the standard PPE.

Since many solar sites are obviously in warm and sunny climates, dehydration is also a major factor and ensuring the team is drinking enough water is absolutely critical. 

Once the site begins to generate electricity, enhanced measures are put in place to ensure the safety of all onsite. Lockout tagout and red-rope are two of these critical steps, which we’ll talk about in future slides.

Once energization has occurred and the project has been handed off from EPC to O&M, the safety risks change quite significantly, and it’s important to recognize these differences, as a construction site is a very different environment from an operating solar power plant site. 

The main dangers include electrical hazards, which remain a persistent threat, wildlife encounters, and the risks of slips, trips, and falls.

Another major risk is complacency. Because O&M technicians work at the site daily, it’s easy to become overly comfortable and forget the inherent dangers of an operating solar PV site.

Unfortunately, no matter how strong your safety program is and how dedicated your company is to ensuring the safety of all employees on site, accidents do happen. 

A recordable injury is the most serious and it’s defined as one of the following:

• Any work related fatality
• Any work related injury or illness that results in loss of consciousness days, away from work, restricted work, or transfer to another job
• Any work-related injury or illness requiring medical treatment beyond first aid
• Any work-related, diagnosed case of cancer, chronic irreversible disease, fractured or cracked bones or teeth, and punctured eardrums.

A common metric to measure the performance of a company in regards to their safe work practices is by using the recordable incident rate or RIR. The formula for calculating RAR within a given timeframe is to take the number of OSHA recordable cases, multiply it by 200,000, and then divide it for the total number of employee labor hours worked at that particular location.