The call came in the middle of a job in Cape Elizabeth. A homeowner in Scarborough wanted a quote and a timeline before winter. Yehuda Gittelson told her he could get to the assessment in three weeks. The installation itself might be six weeks out, depending on crew availability. She seemed surprised. She’d assumed it would move faster.
“That’s where people get confused,” said Gittelson, an installer at Solaris Energy Solutions who has worked on residential and commercial rooftops across southern Maine for several years. “They see the headlines about solar growth and assume the industry has caught up with the demand. It hasn’t.”
Maine’s clean energy workforce reached nearly 16,200 workers in 2024, growing at more than three times the rate of the state’s overall economy. The state has set a goal of 30,000 clean energy jobs by 2030, roughly double the current count in six years. Solar is among the fastest-moving segments within that figure, with installation permit volumes climbing each year and state programs like Solar for All expanding the customer base.
The training pipeline hasn’t kept pace. That gap surfaces differently depending on where you sit: delayed timelines for customers, job listings that stay open for months, and informal on-the-job instruction that most companies still rely on to fill their crews.
Nationally, 86 percent of solar employers reported difficulty filling open positions in 2024, according to the Solar Jobs Census, with 26 percent describing hiring as very difficult. Maine’s conditions largely track that figure, even as state-specific data on unfilled positions remains limited.
Gittelson earned his NABCEP PV Installation Professional certification after completing his mechanical engineering degree at the University of Maine at Orono and spending two years on wind farm development in Aroostook County. He treats the credential as a baseline, not a ceiling. “NABCEP tells you someone knows the theory,” he said. “What it doesn’t tell you is whether they’ve been on a roof in January or dealt with a tricky penetration on a hundred-year-old house. That part takes time.” The distinction comes up often when he’s deciding whether someone new to the trade is actually ready for field work.
Training options in Maine have grown in recent years. ReVision Energy operates a four-year registered apprenticeship program, REEAP, that provides 8,000 hours of paid field experience and 600 classroom hours, leading to state licensure. Portland Adult Education built a pre-apprenticeship track in renewable energy in partnership with Portland Arts and Technology High School and ReVision. The Maine Community College System has expanded curricula at four campuses, in Bangor, Auburn, Calais, and Presque Isle, to include solar and clean energy applications. Since 2022, the Governor’s Energy Office has awarded more than $5 million in grants through the Clean Energy Partnership toward workforce development, and the Solar for All program includes funding to train more than 700 Maine residents in electrical work, construction, and related trades.
Gittelson watches these efforts from the position of someone who has brought apprentices along himself. He calls them genuine starts rather than solutions. “The community college courses are good for getting people interested,” he said, “but interested isn’t the same as ready. You still need a crew willing to take the productivity hit while someone learns.” Smaller contractors rarely have that capacity, he added. A two- or three-person operation can’t absorb a new apprentice the way a 40-employee company can.
Fifty-nine percent of solar installation companies nationwide report training their workforce internally rather than through third-party programs, according to the Solar Jobs Census. For small Maine contractors without dedicated training staff, that model has a ceiling.
Geography adds another wrinkle. Maine’s clean energy job growth has been most pronounced in rural counties, but most training programs, including the Portland Adult Education pre-apprenticeship track and the majority of MCCS-affiliated solar curricula, are concentrated in southern Maine and along the I-95 corridor. A homeowner in Aroostook County considering solar faces a different labor market than one in Cumberland County. The wait times can diverge considerably.
Job types going unfilled extend beyond panel installation. NABCEP offers certification tracks across eight categories, including installation, design, inspection, operations and maintenance, and energy storage. Maintenance work on existing systems is a growing segment with its own skill demands. Gittelson has done service calls on systems installed years ago where the original crew moved on, and nobody local knows the equipment. “You get called to a job that should take two hours,” he said, “and you spend the first hour figuring out what somebody did five years ago because there’s no documentation and nobody around to ask.”
Maine’s goal of 30,000 clean energy jobs by 2030 means adding roughly 14,000 workers to a workforce that grew by about 500 positions between 2022 and 2023. Even with accelerated program expansion, the math is demanding.
For customers, the gap is most apparent during peak installation months, typically late spring through early fall. He sometimes takes calls from homeowners who’ve cycled through other installers looking for a shorter queue. Often, they don’t find one.
“The demand is there,” he said. “The question is whether the training side can grow fast enough to meet it, and right now, nobody can answer that confidently.”