We’re building battery storage faster than we can train the people to run it. Design, permitting, commissioning, operations — all of it needs skilled hands, and the hands aren’t there. When that happens, projects slip and costs climb and renewables get harder to plug in. A lot of companies are stuck right now. Not on hardware. On people. By Sergey Syrvachev
Storage is scaling. The people aren’t.
108 gigawatts of new battery capacity went onto grids last year. That’s the IEA’s number for 2025 — up 40% on 2024, about four-fifths of it utility-scale. So, not a fringe technology anymore. And the line isn’t flattening. The IEA’s Net Zero by 2050 scenario puts storage at 1,200 gigawatts by 2030. Fourteen times where it sat in 2023.
That’s a scenario, not a forecast. Fine. But it tells you the size of what we’re being asked to build. And here’s the part people miss. Want to double a battery factory’s output? Add a line, add a shift. Done. You can’t do that with a commissioning lead. That person gets good slowly. Design reviews. Tests. Watching things break on site and working out why.
Public numbers don’t usually separate out BESS roles, so the clearest evidence is broader than that. The IEA’s World Energy Employment 2025 report surveyed more than 700 energy companies, unions and training bodies. Over half said hiring bottlenecks had gone critical. Around 60% said labor shortages were already threatening schedules, reliability, cost control. And it’s structural, not a blip — across the whole economy, demand for applied technical workers rose 16% between 2015 and 2022 while the relevant vocational graduates went up only 9%. The IEA says that gap is already biting in energy hiring.
Some of this is just history. Energy was never a glamorous place to build a career. So for decades it didn’t pull in many new engineers — jobs were stable, people stayed at one plant for twenty years, nobody worried about a pipeline. Worked fine. Right up until the sector had to grow fast.
Where the gap actually sits
BESS. Four neat letters for a messy plant. Cells, modules, racks. Cooling and fire protection. The battery management system. Inverters, transformers, switchgear. Plant controls, communications, market dispatch, grid-code compliance, warranties, operating procedures. None of it works alone.
Take one routine dispatch instruction. Depending how the plant’s built, it might travel from the grid or market operator to the plant controller, through the energy management system, into the power conversion system — bounded the whole way by limits the battery management system is feeding back. Get the units wrong. Or the timestamps, the control priorities, the ramp-rate logic. Now the plant does something other than what you asked. Same story with a thermal limit. Or a state-of-charge boundary. Or some auxiliary load nobody counted.
Companies react to this by writing a job spec that wants electrochemistry and protection and software and fire safety, all in one head. Good luck. That person barely exists. What’s realistic: deep in one area, literate enough across the rest to notice when a decision has crossed into somebody else’s territory. A BESS site crams an enormous amount of different technology into every square meter. The field is young. People who can genuinely span it — rare.
How a gap becomes a delay
The delay can start before you’ve bought anything. If the owner’s team can’t pin down the service they need, bidders fill the blanks themselves. Different assumptions — usable energy, ambient conditions, cycling, availability, end-of-life capacity. On paper the bids look comparable. They aren’t. It comes back later as a contract clarification, a redesign, a warranty fight.
And it’s not only buyers who are short here. I’ve worked with a lot of vendors over the years, and the technical depth is all over the map — even between suppliers you’d assume are on the same level. The top-tier names get calculations wrong too. Acoustics is the one that catches people out. Sound modeling for a site gets underestimated constantly, even by the big vendors, and you don’t find out until the plant’s commissioned and the neighbors start complaining about the noise. Fire safety is its own mess. And the reports — you can’t take them at face value. I’ve seen test documentation that falls apart the second you look closely, and in my experience some Chinese vendors especially will hand you a report that was never really earned. The buyer signs off because checking it properly needs expertise the buyer doesn’t have. Which is the whole problem, again.
Interconnection is the next squeeze. Those detailed inverter-based-resource studies need people who understand both the model and the real plant it’s meant to stand in for. The US Department of Energy‘s Transmission Interconnection Roadmap says exactly this — not enough staff, hard competition for anyone who mixes engineering with policy. It also notes EMT modeling skills — electromagnetic transient — are thin, and that there’s no real career path or training route into interconnection work to begin with. That’s a US picture, not a global BESS headcount. But it shows you the kind of cross-disciplinary people these projects run on.
By commissioning, the assumptions nobody sorted out earlier turn into failed tests and slipping dates. Sandia National Laboratories’ commissioning guidance lists everyone who might be standing in the room: owner, contractor, battery vendor, system integrator, design engineer, inspectors, EHS staff, first responders, operations, the utility. If nobody’s clear on who owns what, or what “pass” even means, or who’s allowed at the data — one failed test sets off a round of phone calls and retests while crews and equipment sit idle.
Safety needs its own point, because people read it wrong. Good safety work speeds the right decisions up. Nobody’s arguing to lower standards — even if that’s the tradeoff people assume. A fire department or permitting office seeing a modern storage system for the first time will reasonably want more evidence, and take longer over it. Hand them a generic emergency plan and you make it worse. DOE has said as much: across a lot of US localities, uncertainty about how to handle security threats and unexpected storage failures can delay a deployment, or kill it outright. In 2024 the department asked for input on a training program — first responders, utilities, communities, the authorities having jurisdiction.
The most common failure is quieter than any of that, though. One person, asked to make a call that spans several fields, with no context, no tools, no backup to make it well.
Skills aren’t the only bottleneck
Let me be honest about this. No amount of training clears an interconnection queue or builds transmission. Storage projects also run into permitting delays, supply-chain risk, long lead times on equipment, financing costs, market rules that won’t stop shifting. Any one of those can own your schedule by itself.
The workforce gap matters because it makes all of them worse. Thin interconnection teams — slower model reviews. Green owners — weaker permit packages. Overstretched commissioning managers — no time to sort out the interfaces before crews turn up. Plants with bad procedures — endless calls to the vendor for decisions they should be making themselves. Experienced people won’t make every constraint vanish. But they’ll stop a solvable problem from parking itself on the critical path.
What a strategy that works looks like
Job ads have their place. They don’t manufacture experienced candidates. You have to grow capability inside the market and fight over the people already in it. That’s what BESS.courses is built to do
I start from the job. What does this person actually have to decide? A developer, a protection engineer, a field technician — completely different depths. Pretend otherwise and you’re back to writing that impossible one-person spec.
Then look past the small circle who already have “BESS” on the résumé. Power generation. Substations. Industrial automation. Data centers. EVs. Process safety. Telecoms. All of it carries over. What a newcomer needs is a clear, honest account of what storage changes — power flows both ways now, state of charge boxes you in, the asset degrades, the controls are layered, the operating envelope moves, and the performance data carries real contractual weight.
A bit of structure makes that faster. Public programs, in-house academies — they cover the fundamentals. For what it’s worth, this is the gap I’ve been trying to help close. BESS.courses is my own practitioner-led go at it.
But none of it turns into judgment without supervised practice. Give new people the real documents — specs, interface matrices, hazard analyses, models, alarm logs, commissioning records, anonymized where you have to — and let them sit in on design reviews, factory tests, site acceptance tests, incident drills. And the experienced staff doing the teaching need protected time for it. Mentoring dies the second it becomes invisible work bolted onto a full schedule.
Retention is part of the same conversation. Training more people is pointless if the experienced ones burn out, or spend week after week on the road with no recovery, or leave because they can’t see what the next step up even is. Sane workloads. Better planning. A path they can actually see. That’s what keeps hard-won knowledge from walking out the door.
And it can’t stop at the developer’s fence. Grid reviewers, permitting officials, inspectors, first responders — they all shape whether a good project moves with confidence or crawls. Joint exercises, shared reference material — less explaining the same thing twenty times, without softening anyone’s independent oversight.
Developing a skilled workforce is becoming as important as deploying new energy technologies. Without sufficient engineers, technicians, inspectors and grid specialists, investments in renewable generation and battery storage cannot deliver their full environmental or economic benefits. Expanding technical education and workforce development is therefore a critical component of achieving a resilient, low-carbon energy system
The human infrastructure
Battery cost. Energy density. Factory throughput. Easy to track, all of it, sitting on somebody’s dashboard. Capability doesn’t fit on a dashboard as neatly, so it gets treated as something the labor market will just supply when needed. At this build rate, that assumption’s done.
The containers on the pad are the part you can see. The plant only gets dependable when the specialists can make all that equipment behave as one system — and when the people permitting it, inspecting it, dispatching it, maintaining it actually understand its limits and its risks.
Gigawatt targets are useful. But projects get built through a long chain of human calls. A model waved through. A protection setting somebody bothered to double-check. An alarm read right. A failed test that someone actually diagnosed instead of guessing. Build the people who can make those calls — that’s part of building the grid.
Author disclosure: Sergey Syrvachev is the founder of BESS.courses
Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed here by the authors are their own, not those of impakter.com — In the cover: An engineer performs commissioning and diagnostics on a battery energy storage system (BESS), highlighting the specialist technical skills required to design, integrate and operate modern grid-scale energy storage infrastructure supporting the clean energy transition. — Cover Photo Credit: pvproductions
