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.
Remember “your permanent record”?
This time it works for you.