The Story Behind Creating the New PV + BESS Operations & Maintenance Technician Training Standard

In any rapidly growing industry, standardization is crucial to reliability, consistency, and long-term success. For years, operations and maintenance (O&M) practices in the solar and storage industries lacked uniformity, but solar + storage O&M has reached a critical inflection point. 

With thousands of solar arrays and energy storage systems installed nationwide and more being added daily, qualified technicians are in desperately short supply. This shortage threatens not only the performance of existing systems but also the industry’s reputation for reliability. 

Fortunately, a collaborative industry effort, led by dedicated professionals like Amanda Bybee of the Amicus O&M Cooperative and industry organizations like Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and American Clean Power (ACP), has created a clear path forward for O&M technicians through a standardized training framework. 

HeatSpring’s Brittany Heller sat down with Amanda Bybee on the SunCast Media stage at the NABCEP 2025 Conference to talk more about the new SEIA Standard 301: Solar and Energy Storage Operations and Maintenance Standard – Technician Training and how it came to be.

For the full interview, head over to SunCast Media.

To learn more about the new training, head over to the Solar PV and BESS Operations and Maintenance Tech 1 Training page. 

Transcript below.

Brit: What is the process of creating these industry standards? You guys just have one meeting and it’s ready to go? 

Amanda: Yeah. We snap our fingers. Everyone agrees. It’s super smooth and easy. 

Brit: Yeah, I figured it’s consensus right away. 

Amanda: And I myself am pretty new to this process. Certainly there are others in our industry who’ve been doing this far longer than I have.

My particular angle on this – and on why standards matter – is that when we started the Amicus O&M Cooperative in 2016, it was still the Wild West. There was no consistency in the way that we approached contract terms, scopes of work, pricing, any of it. It was all over the place. 

So part of our effort has been to try to bring some consistency in those arenas, so that when a client is working with multiple of our member companies, everybody’s using the same language and the same definitions of things. But of course, we are just one subset of companies providing these services. 

In 2023, Amicus O&M Cooperative was awarded a grant under the Department of Energy’s program called Advancing Equity through Workforce Partnerships. Our proposal to the DOE was that we need to really bring this concept of standardization to a broader swath of the industry. 

I’ll draw a quick distinction between a Standard (capital S) and standardization (little s), which was really what Amicus O&M Cooperative was in position to advance. 

We convened a large advisory committee of 60 different companies that are stakeholders in the way that we manage solar and battery assets. Everyone from asset owners and managers to independent power producers to third-party O&M providers to manufacturers – anyone who had a perspective and a stake in the way that we manage or approach this question of standardization.

We kicked off that process in August of 2023 – got 20 people in a room in Denver for two days. We hashed out the rough draft of this framework where we looked at what each of these companies was already doing individually, where there was commonality, where there were differences, and how we could reconcile them.

The first thing we agreed on was having a four-level technician framework. You could have an entry-level technician all the way up to a very advanced technician. Most of the companies in the room were already using a four-level system. Some had three, some had five, but we agreed to settle on four.

We also agreed to ditch the idea of a level zero. I myself don’t wanna be a zero. I think that’s a little insulting. I asked everybody if we could just start with one, so we have tech one through four. 

Then we got into the nitty gritty of what do you expect a tech one to learn from the point that they’re hired to the point that they’re ready to graduate. There’s a learning that takes place during that period of time, whatever it may be, and then there’s a set of competencies that you want to assess at the end of that level for them to graduate to the next one.

So we hashed that out – what is a level 1? 

We really started from the position of if we are going to successfully expand the workforce of O&M technicians in our country, we have to be willing to train green, entry-level people. Everyone loves to hire experienced technicians and experienced installers and electricians. Of course! However, not enough of them are moving over. We don’t have enough and O&M technicians today to take care of the systems that are already installed. We have to be willing to open that door wider and hopefully bring in a greater swath of people. 

Tech 1 really starts at the beginning. We debated, for example, whether to require a high school or GED or equivalent as a prerequisite to getting hired as a Tech 1. We actually ended up taking out that language and simply saying, you have to have a basic language and math proficiency. Those are required in order to do this work safely, but you don’t have to have a degree to do this. We can train you, so we took out any of that specific credentialing in order to remove barriers. 

In those two days in Denver, we hashed out the general framework. From there, we refined it and we wrote out a curriculum outline that could be used to meet that framework.

We had a series of meetings and task groups with our advisory committee from that August [2023] point until maybe mid-2024. Once we felt like it was pretty well finished, we gave it to SEIA and we said – hey, how about y’all use this? – which is already a sort of a pre-vetted consensus document from all of these participants on the advisory committee. They were able to use that as the starting point, the foundation, for their 301 Standard, which is on solar PV and BESS O&M technician training. 

Brit: Wow. That is quite a lot of work. It’s amazing you were able to just hand that over, because    they’ve been doing tons of standards, so that’s a great starting place.

Amanda: It was. In my mind, we are all working towards the same end. And frankly, I was delighted to share that work with them, because I would much rather them start with that same piece of work, than do it all over again. Like, what’s the point of that? So, I was very happy to share that.

Then the SEIA committee went on, did another pass through it, and made some great improvements. I look at this as the best of consensus building through this iterative process where a number of really smart, passionate, dedicated people got their eyes on the document and made it better with each iteration. 

Brit: Wow. That’s an incredible story. I love that you are bringing people together to do all this stuff. I mean, it makes sense being at the Amicus O&M Cooperative, that you’re all about cooperative work, but it’s really nice to see that. 

Amanda: I used to ask myself like, who am I to be doing this?

And then I realized, well, I’m the cooperative lady. Are you surprised that you’re the one knocking on their door asking them to participate in this kind of thing? So if that’s my legacy, I will take it. 

Brit: Yeah, that’s a pretty cool legacy. I got to say.