Solar Photovoltaic Design and Installation Principles

A solar system is not a commodity you can guess at or copy from a catalog. Every roof is different. Every customer's load is different. Every site has shade patterns, fire-safety constraints, and local codes that shift the design. This course teaches you to move from "I know solar exists" to "I can size a real system and explain every decision to a customer, an inspector, and a crew." You'll start where every good design actually starts: with the load. Not with "how many panels fit on the roof," but with what the customer actually uses and when they use it. Then comes the site—the sun, the shade, the fire-safety parameters that determine whether modules go 10 centimeters or 12 centimeters off the roof. Then comes the math: the framework that turns load and irradiance into a system size that works, adjusted for cold weather, dust, temperature, and geography. By the middle, you'll know PV modules as components with real tradeoffs (not just "22% efficient"). You'll understand string inverters versus microinverters not as marketing categories but as architectural choices driven by shading and performance. You'll recognize rapid shutdown not as a checkbox but as a firefighter's lifeline when DC arcs reach 35,000 degrees. By the end, you'll have designed eight real systems—residential rooftops with batteries, commercial warehouses with three-phase power, ground-mounted arrays, high-shade sites that everyone else has given up on. You'll have walked through NEC Article 690 safety requirements not as rules to memorize but as the backbone of why every decision matters. You'll hand a customer a design proposal they can understand. You'll walk an inspector through every connection. You'll know what can go wrong—and how to prevent it. The goal is simple: given a site, a load, and a budget, you can design a safe, code-compliant photovoltaic system and communicate it clearly to everyone who needs to build, inspect, or own it.