What makes a solar engineer?

The international response to climate change has driven growing demand for engineers trained to design solar energy systems and integrate them into electricity infrastructure. There is a need for some guidance as to what training is necessary for future engineers to meet this demand. This study gathers data from literature, industry perspectives and current educational practice to help establish suitable learning objectives for training undergraduate engineers to be prepared for solar project development. In general, results suggest that students be trained to understand the complete workflow of concepts related to design of photovoltaic systems including solar positioning, the solar resource and irradiance data sources, design of a photovoltaic system from both a solar resource and an electrical perspective and performing calculations to model or support validation of photovoltaic systems. Professionals also highlighted the importance of discussing various types of typical financing structures for solar energy systems, though these were less common in existing courses. The paper summarizes these outcomes with a proposed set of learning objectives that encompasses these highlight areas and that could form the backbone of an undergraduate course on solar energy engineering.