The paperwork arrives a week before the panels do.
Yehuda Gittelson reads a job site before he ever climbs a roof: the ridgeline orientation, the pitch, the shading from a neighbor’s oak tree that satellite imagery missed. He is NABCEP certified, drives a sticker-covered Subaru Outback loaded with tools, and installs residential and commercial photovoltaic systems across southern Maine for Solaris Energy Solutions. He is 28 years old.
Maine’s solar output has climbed from enough to power roughly 2,100 homes in 2015 to more than 204,000 homes today, according to data from the Governor’s Energy Office cited by the Solar Energy Industries Association. Statewide installation costs have fallen 43% over that same decade. Maine ranked second nationally for community solar installations in 2024, behind only New York, with 278.7 megawatts of alternating current installed through December of that year, a volume that few states of its size come close to matching. Solar now accounts for more than 12% of Maine’s electricity.
Up Before the Sun Pays Off
None of that capacity gets built by a press release.
On a Tuesday in January, Gittelson is on a roof in Cape Elizabeth at 7:30 a.m., installing a 9.6-kilowatt residential system. The temperature is 18 degrees. He carries the panels up himself.
“People see the finished product and think it’s clean and simple,” he says. “But you’re problem-solving from the moment you pull into the driveway. Every house is different. The electrical panel is from 1987; there’s no attic access, and the customer added a shed that’s throwing shade on the south face. You adapt.”
The work requires mechanical fluency, comfort at heights, and a working knowledge of the Maine Public Utilities Commission’s interconnection rules governing how new systems tie into the grid. The federal residential clean energy tax credit is 30% for systems installed through 2032, a figure that has kept homeowner inquiries steady even as broader residential solar markets contracted nationwide in 2024. Gittelson’s employer has run a months-long backlog on its installation calendar.
Community Arrays, Regulatory Fog
Residential systems are one piece of Gittelson’s portfolio.
He also works on commercial and community solar installations, which have driven much of Maine’s recent output growth. U.S. commercial solar grew 8% year over year in 2024, reaching 2,118 megawatts, a new annual record, with Maine among the states that contributed to the segment’s strongest year on record.
Maine’s community solar program runs under the state’s Net Energy Billing framework, through which subscribers receive utility bill credits for electricity produced by off-site arrays. The Maine PUC closed the tariff-rate track of the program to new applications at the end of 2023. The kWh crediting track remains open but has been subject to ongoing adjustments. For field crews, that regulatory motion has a practical rhythm.
“When policy changes, the phone gets quieter,” Gittelson says. “Developers slow down, and some of that trickles down to field crews. You learn to read the regulatory calendar the same way you read the weather.”
A Thin Bench
Gittelson earned his North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners certification after completing a mechanical engineering degree at the University of Maine at Orono. Together, those credentials let him handle structural load calculations, inverter diagnostics, and system layout design alongside the physical installation work. Few field technicians at his experience level cover that range.
Maine’s solar workforce pipeline has not kept pace with employer demand. The University of Maine system has added technical programming, but the pool of credentialed installers remains narrow. Gittelson finds himself training newer hires in the field more often than he anticipated.
“The NABCEP exam is genuinely hard,” he says. “It weeds people out. But the bigger issue is just getting people interested in the trades in the first place. Everyone’s pushing four-year degrees, and the guys who actually want to build things sometimes don’t know this work exists.”
18 Degrees, No Complaints
What the statewide data doesn’t show is what the job looks like in January, on a coastal roof where wind comes off the water, and a poorly sealed penetration means a call-back come spring. Gittelson has learned to care about that detail because he’ll be the one fielding the call.
He drives home through East Bayside most evenings with a thermos of black coffee, already checking the forecast for the next morning’s site. Maine winters are long. The installation season doesn’t stop.