Running operations at a solar farm, wind site, or other clean-energy facility, you own the site's day-to-day — production, maintenance, safety, vendor coordination, and the regulatory paperwork that comes with grid-connected generation.
Days are a mix of morning ops reviews, SCADA dashboard checks, vendor calls, and walks across the array or pad — watching for underperformance, checking on a fault that tripped overnight, prepping a planned outage. You're often coordinating O&M technicians, the utility, and asset-owner reporting. Availability, capacity factor, and safety days tend to be the operating numbers.
The harder part is often the remoteness of many sites — clean-energy facilities tend to live in rural areas with thin labor markets and long drives for parts. Variance across employers can be sharp: at independent power producers the discipline runs deep; at smaller asset managers you're wearing more hats and standing up systems yourself. Weather and grid events can scramble plans.
People who tend to thrive here are operations-minded, comfortable outdoors, and unfazed by remote postings. Background in electrical, mechanical, or industrial ops helps. The trade-off is lifestyle geography: site managers often relocate where the projects are, which can be far from family or amenities.
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Roles like this one sit within a broader occupational category. The numbers below reflect that full landscape — helpful for context, but your specific experience will depend on level, specialty, and where you work.
Roles with similar work and overlapping career paths
View all Business Operations roles →Running operations at a solar farm, wind site, or other clean-energy facility, you own the site's day-to-day — production, maintenance, safety, vendor coordination, and the regulatory paperwork that comes with grid-connected generation.
Median pay for a Clean Energy Site Manager is about $137K nationally, with the field ranging roughly from $69K to $228K depending on experience, employer, and metro (BLS).
Core skills for this role include Active Listening, Critical Thinking, Monitoring, Speaking, and Reading Comprehension.
Most people in this role hold a postsecondary certificate.
Employment in this field is projected to grow about 4.5% through 2034, with roughly 630,980 people working in it today (BLS).
Closely related roles include Energy Director, Site Director, and Renewable Energy Specialist.
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