Storage: what we cover, and what we do not.

Our courses prepare candidates for the NABCEP PV Associate examination. That examination covers batteries and charge controllers at the level its job task analysis requires — real, but foundational. We are not a storage specialist provider and will not describe ourselves as one.

What is genuinely covered

• Why storage changes a system. The difference between a grid-tied array and one with batteries, in architecture rather than in brochure terms.
• Battery fundamentals. Capacity, depth of discharge, cycles, round-trip efficiency, and why the headline capacity is not the usable capacity.
• Charge controllers. What they do, pulse-width modulation against maximum power point tracking, and sizing them.
• Autonomy and sizing. Calculating how long a bank carries a load, and the losses that make a first estimate optimistic.
• Safety. Enclosure, ventilation, disconnection, and the fact that a battery is a source you cannot switch off either.
• Where storage makes financial sense and, more often, where it does not.

What is not covered

• Manufacturer-specific commissioning and configuration for particular battery systems. Those are vendor training courses, and the vendors run them properly.
• Utility-scale storage, which is a different engineering discipline.
• Advanced load-shifting and demand-charge optimisation for commercial sites.
• Any separate storage credential. We do not issue one, and NABCEP's energy-storage credentialing is its own programme with its own requirements, not something our Associate courses lead to.

The honest commercial point

A great deal of storage training is sold on the premise that batteries are about to be on every roof. In Canada, for most grid-connected homes with net metering, the arithmetic for a battery is still difficult — you are buying resilience rather than savings, and the two get conflated in sales conversations. Being able to say that clearly to a customer is more valuable than being able to configure one particular manufacturer's inverter, and it is what we teach.

Where storage genuinely stacks up: off-grid and remote sites, properties with poor supply reliability, and commercial sites with significant demand charges. Those are real markets and worth understanding properly.

Where to go for more

For deeper storage work, the honest sequence is: the fundamentals here, then manufacturer training from whichever system you will actually install, then field experience. If you want a storage-specific credential, go to the body that issues it rather than to a trainer that implies it.

The Fast-Track course → · Self-paced →

Common questions