When I was sent to the Yasawa Islands in Fiji to commission a 1.6 megawatt-hour off-grid solar battery installation across three remote island resorts, I thought I had a good handle on what the job required.
Commission the system. Some maintenance training. Come home.
What I didn’t fully appreciate until I was standing on a remote Fijian island with five local electricians and a tight schedule was that one of the most challenging parts of this project had nothing to do with the hardware.
The system performed. That was never in question. The question was whether the local sparkies left behind to run it would be able to keep it running – six months later or even a year later when something unexpected happened and we weren’t there.
That’s a very different problem to solve. And you can’t solve it by shipping a manual.
