The fleet is aging into its operations decade.
Every solar farm, wind farm and battery that reached commercial operation over the last ten years is now somebody's asset to run. The maths is simple and relentless. Construction demand peaks and passes. Operations demand arrives the day the asset is energised and stays for thirty years. Across the projects LUVI tracks, the operating fleet has grown every single year while the pool of people who know how to run these assets has barely moved.
The industry planned carefully for construction labour. It planned far less carefully for what happens after practical completion. Owners assumed the OEMs would carry the maintenance load, the OEMs assumed the owners would build operations teams, and the result in 2026 is a market where experienced renewables operations people are as contested as BESS commissioning engineers were two years ago.
The roles in shortest supply.
- Asset managers. The commercial owners of portfolio performance. The good ones blend PPA literacy, contractor management and enough engineering to challenge an availability report. Almost every fund and developer with an operating portfolio is hiring here.
- Plant managers and site supervisors. Solar and wind sites that ran lean on a single caretaker are professionalising. Batteries co located with generation have made the job harder and the person scarcer.
- HV field technicians. The single tightest trade in operations. Switching qualified technicians who can work across inverters, transformers and substations are being contested by asset owners, OEMs and the transmission builders all at once.
- Performance and reliability engineers. The people who turn SCADA data into recovered megawatt hours. A small national pool, mostly clustered in Melbourne and Brisbane, and heavily recruited by the larger portfolio owners.
Why the pool never got built.
Three reasons. First, construction paid better for a decade, so the ambitious talent followed the build. Second, operations roles sit where the assets sit, and the assets sit in regional New South Wales, western Victoria and regional Queensland. The candidate willing to live in or service those regions is a different and smaller market than the capital city engineering pool. Third, the skills are genuinely hybrid. A wind technician with HV switching tickets and a data mindset did not exist as a job description fifteen years ago, and the training system is still catching up.
The consequence is that most operations hires are poached rather than developed. That works for the poacher and inflates packages for everyone. Asset managers with five years of genuine portfolio experience have seen packages lift well ahead of the broader market, and the regional site roles now routinely carry premiums that would have looked absurd in 2020.
What smart owners are doing about it.
The owners getting ahead of this are doing three things:
- Hiring operations leads before handover. The best time to bring in a plant manager is during commissioning, not after the construction team has demobilised and taken the site knowledge with it. The owners who staff operations six months early consistently report cleaner handovers and better first year availability.
- Building from adjacent industries. Coal plant operators, gas plant technicians, mining maintenance planners and network technicians all carry transferable skills. The owners willing to train the renewables layer on top of proven industrial experience are filling roles the purists cannot.
- Treating regional talent as a strategy, not an accident. Local hiring, genuine training pathways and rosters that respect the community the asset sits in. The sites with the lowest turnover are the ones that stopped trying to service everything from the capital cities.
The construction decade built the fleet. The operations decade decides who profits from it. You can explore the operating and committed pipeline in our proprietary Australian energy and infrastructure database.