The Career Path Yehuda Gittelson Didn’t Plan and Wouldn’t Trade

There was no obvious straight line from a mechanical engineering degree at the University of Maine at Orono to a rooftop in Cape Elizabeth with a drill in hand. Yehuda Gittelson didn’t graduate with the intention of becoming a solar installer. He graduated with the intention of working in energy, which turned out to be a meaningful distinction.

The University of Maine’s mechanical engineering program trains graduates for a wide range of technical fields — product development, manufacturing, power generation, and construction. Faculty research at Orono spans offshore wind systems, floating energy structures, and solar-thermal applications. The program gives students a rigorous grounding in thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and structural analysis without pointing them toward any single industry. For Gittelson, that breadth was ultimately more useful than a narrower specialization would have been.

“I didn’t know what I wanted to do with it when I graduated,” he said. “I knew I wanted to work outside and work on things that felt like they mattered. Wind and solar were the obvious answer.”

Two Years in Aroostook County

The first job after graduation was with a wind farm development company in Aroostook County, the broad and thinly populated expanse of northern Maine that has become one of the state’s primary sites for utility-scale wind development. The work was not glamorous. Aroostook winters are punishing, and wind development timelines are governed more by permitting and grid interconnection processes than by construction schedules. Gittelson spent a significant portion of his time there understanding the gap between a project’s approval and its actual completion, often years.

What the job gave him was a systems-level literacy that most solar installers never acquire. He learned how utility-scale energy projects connect to the grid, how load profiles are forecasted, and how a project’s economics shift when the interconnection queue stalls. He learned, in practical terms, that energy infrastructure is not just an engineering problem but a regulatory and logistical one. That knowledge traveled with him when he relocated to Portland.

At Solaris Energy Solutions, where Gittelson now installs and maintains residential and commercial photovoltaic systems across southern Maine, that background translates into an unusual facility for reading a project’s full context — not just the roof in front of him, but the utility territory it sits in, the net energy billing structure that will govern its economics, and the permitting timeline that will determine when the system actually goes live.

The NABCEP Decision

The decision to pursue NABCEP certification was not something Gittelson agonized over. With his engineering degree, field experience in Aroostook, and growing commercial project credits at Solaris, he was positioned to meet the credential’s eligibility requirements more quickly than most candidates with purely residential backgrounds. The PV Installation Professional exam tests electrical theory, photovoltaic system design, the National Electrical Code, battery storage fundamentals, and project documentation — material Gittelson had encountered not just in training but in the field, under conditions that forced genuine comprehension.

The certification itself is accredited to the ISO/IEC 17024 international standard for personnel certification bodies, which is the same framework used by credentialing organizations across medicine, finance, and engineering. Roughly 18,000 solar professionals hold one of NABCEP’s credentials nationwide, ranging from the entry-level PV Associate to the board-level PVIP held by Gittelson. In Maine and several other states, NABCEP certification is also tied to eligibility for state rebate programs, giving the credential a regulatory dimension beyond its professional signaling value.

“The exam wasn’t easy,” Gittelson said. “But the harder part was the documentation. Pulling together verified project records and making sure the system sizes were correctly categorized — that took real time.”

What Portland Made Possible

The move from Aroostook County to Portland put Gittelson in a different kind of labor market. Southern Maine’s residential solar demand has grown alongside the state’s broader clean energy buildout. Maine’s clean energy sector employed nearly 16,200 workers in 2024, growing 4% year over year and faster than any other New England state over the four preceding years, according to the state Department of Energy Resources. Portland, with its high homeownership rate, relatively high electricity costs, and exposure to environmental values, has become one of the state’s more active residential solar markets.

The city also placed Gittelson near the Warm Homes Maine weatherization program, where he volunteers to insulate and air-seal homes for low-income families. The two strands of his professional life — commercial installation and community energy access — are not unrelated in his thinking. Both are concerned with how buildings consume and conserve energy. The technical skills transfer. The orientation toward households that have historically lacked access to clean energy investment is something he developed in Aroostook, where the economics of rural Maine are difficult to miss.

The Shape of What’s Next

Gittelson is currently tracking continuing education hours toward NABCEP recertification, with a focus on battery storage integration. Maine has committed to 400 megawatts of energy storage procurement by 2030, and the technical demands of solar-plus-storage installations are reshaping what the job requires. An installer who was well-versed in residential photovoltaics in 2018 is not automatically equipped to design and commission a battery-backed system in 2025. The NEC sections governing energy storage are distinct from those covering basic PV installations, and the safety considerations — thermal runaway risk, arc flash exposure, proper sizing relative to the connected array — require specific training.

None of that worries Gittelson particularly. He has spent his working life so far in a field that keeps changing the technical demands on the people in it. Wind, then solar, then solar-plus-storage. The credential he holds is one structured response to that reality: a documented commitment to keeping technical knowledge current rather than merely accumulated.

“The work has never really been the same two years running,” Gittelson said. “That’s what keeps it from feeling like just a job.”