太陽光技術者不足が深刻化

Solar plays an outsized role in skills and employment, as the largest growing employer in the energy sector worldwide. pv magazine looks at an investigative report into a European skills provider and digs further into the challenges of training workers for the solar industry. The post Solar skills shortage intensifies appeared first on pv magazine Global . Solar plays an outsized role in skills and employment, as the largest growing employer in the energy sector worldwide. pv magazine looks at an investigative report into a European skills provider and digs further into the challenges of training workers for the solar industry. The post Solar skills shortage intensifies appeared first on pv magazine Global . Solar plays an outsized role in skills and employment, as the largest growing employer in the energy sector worldwide. pv magazine looks at an investigative report into a European skills provider and digs further into the challenges of training workers for the solar industry. In December 2024, pv magazine reported that 800,000 workers needed to be trained in Europe alone for green tech industries. Two years on, the InnoEnergy Skills Institute featured in that article has been the target of an investigative journalism outlet, while global industrial and geopolitical landscapes have changed dramatically, parallel to increasing stressors of demographic challenges, increased automation, and AI. The allegations made by investigative journalism outlet Follow the Money (FTM) criticized the Skills Institutes’ certification mechanisms, its methods of calculating success, and use of funding received for skills training from the European government. InnoEnergy Skills Institute responded to pv magazine’s questions about the FTM investigation, directly addressing assertions leveled at it. The Skills Institute acknowledged the importance of public scrutiny and admitted that the article did, in fact, prompt reflection and further strengthening in a number of operational areas. Conversations with other institutes, as well as recent studies on skills and employment from European and international organizations, reveal a bigger picture of challenges facing skills acquisition in Europe and beyond – largely concurring with the InnoEnergy Skills Institute’s statement describing the context missing in the FTM investigative article. Peter Schumann, project manager at Batterie MD – a cluster of 10 partners from skills institutes including universities, adult education, training and retraining providers, industry and research in Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia, Germany – and Stephanie Anderseck from the cluster’s research partner, Fraunhofer IKTS, noted a dramatic shift in the battery landscape and the skills required. Anderseck and Schumann described how Europe and especially Germany was expecting domestic battery cell manufacturing for the automotive industry, requiring apparently hundreds of thousands of newly skilled and reskilled workers. But electric vehicle growth was overestimated, a number of battery fabs went broke or pulled out, and attention in Europe turned to massive interest in battery energy storage systems (BESS). That meant the battery skills provider sector had to pivot. Demographics matter According to flagship 2025 report “Jobs and skills for the new economy,” published by the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ) and international partners, skills providers and governments need to “develop stronger workforce intelligence systems to better anticipate jobs and skills impacts of the transition, especially on vulnerable workers, including by expanding use of real-time data and artificial intelligence.” InnoEnergy Skills Institute said it has such mechanisms in place. If not adequately addressed, the shrinking dynamic of the automotive industry may have a significant negative effect on the solar industry. The GIZ study notes that failure to provide secure jobs for redundant workers in legacy industries turns public opinion against the energy transition, directly affecting community acceptance of solar projects and the energy transition in general. A superficial glance may assume redundant workers will be absorbed into growing industries. But while distributed solar requires more workers, utility-scale solar requires fewer, and the added factors of AI and automation reduce the need for workers. As noted in one study, “the IEA warns that many clean energy jobs will likely emerge in entirely different places from where fossil fuel jobs are disappearing.” Two issues are essential here: standardized skills employers can rely on, and worker mobility within Europe. Fragmentation is a core problem. “Across Europe, training systems for clean tech roles vary significantly by country in entry requirements, curriculum, assessment standards, and how qualifications are recognized by employers and national authorities,” said InnoEnergy Skills Institute. As a result, qualifications are not always easily understood or portable across borders, which, as the institute pointed out, can limit labor mobility. To bridge this gap, InnoEnergy Skills Institute developed the European Installer Training and Credential Initiative with SolarPower Europe under the European Solar Academy with training providers from Germany, Poland, Romania, Finland, and France to build a common curriculum, shared assessment framework, and portable digital credentials aligned with EU skills frameworks and the Green Skills Framework and Taxonomy. As Jan Osenberg at SolarPower Europe put it, a clear certification that transcends borders makes recruitment easier and ensures a skilled, reliable workforce. According to a May 2026 Financial Times article titled “Four ways Europe’s big immigration experiment has changed Spain,” one in four jobs added in the European Union this decade has been in Spain and 70% of these new jobs have been taken up by immigrants. Thanks to migration, the economy is growing, but so is the potential for social division if local workers are not engaged. Richard Wyatt is people director at Low Carbon. Based in the United Kingdom, Low Carbon is also active in mainland Europe, including in Poland and Germany, where it is focused on building out its pipeline of utility-scale solar, onshore wind and energy storage. When asked about hurdles to finding workers with the right skills, Wyatt said Low Carbon is affected by the same issues pv magazine readers will be familiar with. “While there is generally public support for solar,” he noted, “changes to government policy and grid challenges” make it difficult for students, workers and employers to confidently invest in solar skills. Nevertheless, Low Carbon has relationships with specific universities that are independent of government policy. “We do a lot of work with Lancaster University, for example, and do real world projects with them where we’ll have interns come into the business or we’ll outsource opportunities to them.” Addressing unemployed people who have low-skill levels requires different approaches. Hands-on learning is key. While online courses can provide a theoretical base, workers need physical context and less formal teaching environments. Saxony battery education cluster and InnoEnergy Skills Institute told pv magazine how they actively engage in physical presence training with local providers. Here, InnoEnergy Skills Institute points out that their European Solar PV Credentials initiative delivers on-site, practical installer training through a network of local providers, with assessments conducted in person by third-party evaluators who can verify installer competency in real working conditions. InnoEnergy Skills Institute’s Solar Module Manufacturing Fundamentals program takes a different approach to hands-on learning, using interactive 3D simulations that replicate real solar production environments, so learners develop operational understanding before they step onto a factory floor. Skills standards Employers worldwide need to be able to count on the skills that come with different qualifications. “When you compare utility-scale solar and battery storage, these are the only major energy technology that doesn’t have a set of global training standards for its technicians,” Global Solar Council CEO Sonia Dunlop explained. “The specific initiative that we launched last summer is the Global Solar Training Standards. We’ve done that in partnership with the Global Wind Organisation.” Dunlop said this push for skills standards is also driven by demand from investors and insurers of utility-scale PV. She said the Global Solar Training Standard also ensures that projects are performing to spec. “And as well as doing all the other things like making life easier for the insurers, we’ve actually had some examples of providers seeing a 50% reduction in their insurance costs.” Dunlop noted that while significant progress has been made on training large scale solar technicians, the battery storage industry is comparatively nascent, and there is more progress to be made on training. Here, Schumann noted that it is extremely difficult to create certification standards for battery storage when local and regional regulations are diverse and developing dynamically. This has presented challenging situations with skills providers and employers that want a reliable measure of skills readiness. Wyatt identified skills readiness among Low Carbon’s greatest personnel challenges. InnoEnergy Skills Institute said that shared European credentials and competency frameworks give employers across EU member states a common reference. A credential from their European Installer Training and Credential Initiative carries the same standards whether it was earned in Finland or Romania. “That is what makes it useful for cross-border workforce mobility and hiring confidence,” the Institute explains. Local delivery is where context gets applied with training providers in each country. InnoEnergy Skills insti