The United States Department of Energy’s Federal Energy Management Program partnered with the Department of the Interior’s US Fish & Wildlife Service to produce much needed training that covered maintenance, system operations, and the safety of grid-tied small scale PV systems.
Fish and Wildlife Service energy managers benefited from this training because it is basically one third about operations and maintenance, trying to make sure that our systems are operating and being maintained the way they were supposed to; one third about awareness that the systems are definitely operational, you can’t just turn them on and leave them and walk away, and also one third about the safety aspects of the training.
The training comes at a time when many sites have installed PV systems but are now challenged to receive adequate training to maintain them safely.
One of the challenges Fort Bragg faces is being able to secure effective training. The FEMP training on PV was really helpful for us and came at a really good time. In fact, we had been looking at providing the technicians in the electrical shop with some solar photovoltaic training, simply because we were having more and more of these systems installed.
We had actually contacted a local university and they had proposed coming out and doing a day training on basic operations and maintenance. To train the group that we have it would have been upwards of $5000.
So the FEMP training that was free really covered the same material and gave our technicians a great amount of confidence and ability to go out and work on these systems, trouble shoot and do some simple O&M, as well as actually having the understanding of how the DC voltage works in these systems and just give them the knowledge and a push and the confidence to be able to go out work on it themselves.
I would say that training is of the utmost importance when you have a high turnover of personnel. If you have good continuity from one group of leaders to the next, then you can maintain your status quo so to speak, keep a good production of power or utilities in general.
There’s not a time that would go by, if something were to break or disaster strike, that we could not find a fix and we’d have trained experience personnel there to do it.
The training rated highly, and participants found it to be useful, in day-to-day, on the job situations.
So I first heard about the FEMP training I engaged our electrical shop manager and asked if his electricians would like to be involved, and he agreed that they would.
He sent the word out. Pretty much the entire shop showed up, we had 15 guys.
It really worked out well that way because it was interactive for us. After the meeting there was a lot of collaboration of ideas and experience and just general questions that were generated afterwards that each of us could answer from our own experience.
The training offered insight into how inspections and best practices can safeguard system guarantees and warranties.
We found out that the system was actually installed incorrectly on one of the panels. The electrical wiring was actually reversed on those. We were lucky because the system was under warranty, and we had a maintenance contractor come out and fix that for us. If we hadn’t caught it, it would have costs us additional monies. Now we have a maintenance contractor that’s handling the system, but down the road, is that something we’d be interested in taking on ourselves? For the maintenance portion of it, it’s given us more insight into that.
So here on Fort Bragg, as the photovoltaic systems have started to show up, in the initial onset of that, there were not many people who had the training or the background to really identify problems, even in the inspection process. So we actually had a few initial problems with some of those early systems.
After we had training, however, there was actually a photovoltaic installation in progress, and some of the individuals who had been trained on how these systems were supposed to be properly installed were able to go onsite during an inspection process, and found numerous errors that the contractor had overlooked, regarding the ballasting of the system, and the orientation of the arrays themselves. They were actually able to get the contractor to come back out and make corrections to the system. The training that we had really helped us to ensure we have better systems for the long run.
Training participants took away a greater appreciation of the preventative maintenance needed to keep systems running at optimum performance.
We understood and had a greater awareness of the system, and that we had to step up our preventative maintenance modules. Where we used to come out quarterly before we came out more often to check it and to validate the operations of the system and could increase checks and points of what the system should be doing, how it should be behaving. We also increased our monitoring of the system during periodic thunderstorms or power surges that we could experience, which are common in this area.
The training provided a good working knowledge. PV has been around for awhile, but a lot of people, unless they’re in that field, they don’t have the experience to mess with it. That’s what we needed, a good hands on training that identified the components and how to work on it safely, efficiently, and ensure the longevity of the investment.
Hands on safety demonstrations provided the biggest take away from the course.
Practically one third of this training is devoted to safety, which is critical to ensure that our employees and contractors who work on our solar PV systems are protected, and ensure that they are aware that these systems are live and can actually cause harm they are not handled properly.
This training is really at the heart of what safety is all about. It’s more than just reading a policy and following steps. This training actually covers what you need in a video in a “how to” process and it gets at the heart of what folks need to wear and the training that they need to have when they are doing preventative maintenance or troubleshooting on these photovoltaic systems.
It covered four important areas. The first was Personal Protective Equipment that folks must wear when working on these systems, the second is proper lockout/tagout procedures, the third is arcflash/arcblast protection and the last one is rooftop safety.
Were currently writing a new electrical policy, and that electrical policy will cover who can work on what types of electrical systems, and what training they have to have be qualified and authorized to work on the types of electrical systems we have in the Fish and Wildlife Service.
The FEMP training we took certainly made the electrical shop technicians more confident in their ability to go out and troubleshoot a system. Beforehand a lot of them did not understand how they connected to the grid, if there were battery system a part of those systems or not, and really much about DC voltage in general. These guys generally deal with AC current so the DC world is a whole different animal, so that introduction through the FEMP training was incredibly beneficial from a safety perspective and just simply a troubleshooting and O&M perspective.
This PV Training partnership with FEMP has proven to be very successful, and I believe that the training has received a number of attendees, so far approximately 1000.
US Fish and Wildlife Service would definitely be willing to partner again with FEMP on developing additional training courses. So that we can not only ensure that our people are trained correctly, but also that other federal employees can benefit from this training.
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