NOVA in the News

Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal (Link to original article)
November 2, 2007

Colleges get grants to help beef up supply of solar installers

The solar-panel market in California already has a demand for workers.

Now a group of Silicon Valley leaders is making sure there will be a supply.

A two-year, $645,000 grant from the California Community Colleges State Chancellor's Office will fund a program by several area colleges to train and certify workers to install solar photovoltaic panels. The industry is pitching in an additional $800,000 in equipment, time and personnel to develop the curriculum for initially 125 students at San Jose City, Cabrillo and Ohlone colleges starting in spring 2008.

"There's an overwhelming wave of need coming," said Justin Bradley, director of energy programs for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. "If we anticipate it ahead of time, we're much less likely to lose opportunities [because of] the lack of trained work force. There's a lot of competition in this sector."

The uniform certification with the North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners will ease the concerns of some potential buyers, possibly making the local market more lucrative, said Nancy Hartsoch, vice president of solar company SolFocus.

California makes up 7 percent of the global demand for solar energy, while the entire U.S. is 10 percent of the market.

Several other community colleges are involved in the program, although they won't initially be teaching the skills: De Anza, West Valley and Mission colleges.

"We're going to develop a curriculum from the ground up," said De Anza College's Rick Kuhn, director of Professional & Workforce Development. "Then we're taking the curriculum and disseminating it as quickly as possible."

The Silicon Valley Leadership Group's S.V. Works and industry consortium SolarTech are also closely involved in the program, which will begin on Nov. 6 interviewing solar installers to find out what the courses need to teach, Bradley said. The program will employ an apprentice-style of learning, although the details are still being decided, Bradley said.

The program is the response of the community colleges to a February meeting in which solar industry officials spoke of the need for trained installers -- a need that SolarTech predicts will reach 10,000 solar installers and related jobs over the next decade.

"What the community colleges latched on to from that day is the growth of the solar industry, which is 30 percent per year, and for some companies greater than 100 percent per year," Bradley said. "With the doubling of demand comes the need for a talented and available work force."

The grant was announced Oct. 2 and approved about a week later. Students must apply to enter the initial training programs, Kuhn said.

Installation is a huge part of the effectiveness of solar panels, said Hartsoch of SolFocus.

Currently, many installers are trained on the job, which creates a bottleneck for installation and increases prices, Hartsoch said. Also, many of the workers are from the construction industry and are not trained in the specific handling of solar panels, she said.

"The future of green collar jobs is very much a reality. There's going to be tremendous opportunity for hiring," she said.

Hartsoch noted that there's an equal need for universities to develop curriculum to train those in the technology behind the panels, which is already being started at the University of California-Merced.

The Silicon Valley Leadership Group plans to assess other workforce gaps in the cleantech industry in November and examine other shortfalls, perhaps associated with the retirement of baby boomers, in February, Bradley said.

"We have to be nimble," Bradley said. "And we can't expect that long-established industries will see the problems and respond to them quickly enough."

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