Arkadi Port built Israel’s first commercial hybrid solar-and-battery control architecture. He believes the renewables hiring crisis has a simpler fix than anyone admits
In the renewables sector alone, 60 percent of professionals now use artificial intelligence in their daily work, yet engineering and technical roles remain the hardest positions to fill. That contradiction sits at the center of the 2026 Global Energy Talent Index (GETI). Based on a survey of over 9,000 professionals across 143 countries, the report found that half of hiring managers in renewables identify engineering and technical operations as the most difficult roles to recruit for. In traditional energy sectors, the demographic picture is especially stark: workers aged 45 and older make up 48 percent of the workforce, while those between 25 and 34 account for just 19 percent. Global mobility is at a record low.
Much of the conversation around this shortage focuses on university programs, apprenticeships, and government subsidies. Far less attention goes to a talent pool that already exists: engineers working in industrial automation. They program PLCs, configure SCADA systems, and commission control architectures in cement plants, chemical facilities, and defense installations. Arkadi Port, a recognized specialist in Energy Management System design and one of the earliest hands-on experts in Israel’s hybrid solar-and-battery sector, with over a decade of experience spanning industrial automation and large-scale renewable energy integration, knows firsthand how transferable those skills are, because he built his entire renewable energy career on them.
Cement dust and Modbus registers
Port graduated from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, with a degree in electrical engineering and spent several years in industrial automation before ever touching a solar inverter. At a cement production facility in Israel, he led the migration of a full HMI system from a legacy platform to a modern SCADA system, deploying new servers and data logging infrastructure along the way. At a sustainable packaging facility in central Israel, he led the replacement of a decades-old legacy control system with modern PLC controllers and an updated HMI interface. A defense sector project involved migrating a legacy SCADA platform to a modern environment, deploying redundant server architecture, and upgrading PLC platforms to current-generation controllers.
“People assume renewable energy is its own discipline, completely separate from industrial controls,” Port says. ”But when you open the cabinet of a 15-megawatt solar-and-battery plant, you find the same PLC hardware, the same Modbus registers, the same need for alarm logic and error recovery that you’d see in a cement factory. What changes is the application layer, not the engineering foundation underneath.”
None of these projects involved a single solar panel. Yet every one of them demanded exactly the kind of thinking that renewable energy integration now desperately needs: system-level coordination, multi-vendor communication, and the ability to keep complex operations running while replacing critical components.
Plenty of hardware, no recipe
When Port moved into renewables, the physical equipment: panels, lithium-ion containers, power conversion units was commercially available and well-documented by manufacturers. What nobody had assembled was the software brain tying all of it into a single, grid-compliant operation. Each vendor shipped manuals for its own device. Nowhere did a unified recipe exist for making inverters, batteries, protection relays, and metering equipment cooperate under live grid constraints.
Port had the opportunity to take part in the establishment of some of the first energy storage system infrastructures in the country, working alongside professionals from multiple disciplines: electrical engineers, power systems specialists, battery storage vendors, and system integrators – to build and integrate systems that had no domestic precedent. Rather than improvising from scratch at every site, he built a portable EMS blueprint: predefined rules governing how energy flows between generation and storage, how export caps are enforced, how equipment failures trigger automatic responses, and how data moves between controllers. The blueprint could plug into varying hardware lineups without a ground-up rewrite each time.
One of the earliest projects to apply it became a landmark for the Israeli energy sector. Port’s original contribution, the development and implementation of a system-level Energy Management System architecture capable of coordinating photovoltaic generation and battery energy storage as a single grid-compliant unit, resulted in what was recognized as the first approved hybrid PV and Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) in Israel to operate commercially on the national grid. The plant paired several megawatts of photovoltaic capacity with over ten megawatt-hours of battery storage, and no comparable integration had been attempted domestically before. The project’s significance was underscored by official recognition: it received operating permit number 0001, the first of its kind issued in Israel for a hybrid installation, and its inauguration ceremony was attended by the Director General of the Israeli Ministry of Energy and the Chairman of the Israel Electricity Authority. No ready-made recipe existed for making these subsystems work together at that scale; every control decision: when to charge, when to discharge, how to respond to grid operator commands – had to be defined, tested, and validated under live conditions. It was not an incremental improvement on an existing model but a foundational piece of engineering that demonstrated hybrid renewable energy integration was viable in the country’s regulatory and grid environment.
“Commissioning a hybrid plant is not like commissioning a standalone solar farm,” Port explains. ”You have subsystems that affect each other in real time. An unexpected change in one component – a sudden shift in battery state of charge, an inverter curtailment, a grid command arriving mid-cycle – can ripple through the entire energy balance of the plant if the EMS isn’t prepared for it. Industrial automation taught me to think through those edge cases before they ever occur in the field. Industrial automation taught me to think about those interactions before they become emergencies.”
Copy, adapt, commission, repeat
After that initial deployment, the same blueprint was carried forward to additional installations. Across roughly fifteen sites totaling approximately 150 MWp of photovoltaic capacity and 300 MWh of battery storage, the portable approach cut down on guesswork and compressed the learning curve from one project to the next. Inverter brands varied; storage configurations changed; grid compliance rules shifted between locations, yet the core EMS architecture absorbed those differences without collapsing.
In a relatively short time, the broader industry developed at a remarkable pace. Today, there are already hundreds of operational sites across Israel that store and manage solar energy, and these systems are responsible for a significant and growing portion of the country’s energy production. What was once an experimental niche has become a critical pillar of the national grid – a shift that Port witnessed firsthand from inside the PLC cabinets where much of that growth was engineered.
Scaling was not just a matter of copying files from one programmable controller to another, though. As projects expanded, Port trained newly hired engineers entering the hybrid energy division, walking them through EMS logic, control strategy decisions, and the practical realities of commissioning under real operating conditions. Initial implementations of unfamiliar inverter and storage configurations were completed under his responsibility before being handed off for replication at subsequent sites.
“You can write the best EMS logic in the world, but if only one person understands it, you haven’t solved anything,” he says. ”Scaling means building a team that can carry the methodology forward without reinventing every decision when a new engineer joins.”
What comes after fifteen plants
Port now works as an independent consultant, engaged by renewable energy developers, equipment vendors, SCADA and EMS solution providers, and EPC contractors to ensure that hybrid solar-and-battery installations reach stable, grid-compliant operation. The demand for his services reflects how few specialists combine deep industrial automation expertise with hands-on renewable energy EMS experience at this level.
Between industrial automation and his first renewable energy project, the transition was measured in weeks of applied learning, not years of retraining. An engineer who spent a decade programming Allen-Bradley PLCs and integrating Modbus TCP networks in a chemical plant can learn the specifics of battery charge-discharge logic in months. An engineer who studied solar panel efficiency in graduate school but has never commissioned a control system in a live industrial environment will need much longer to reach the same operational confidence. Yet the industry keeps writing job descriptions that favor the second profile over the first.
Looking ahead, Port sees the next major opportunity not in larger utility-scale plants but in the opposite direction: smaller-scale energy storage infrastructures designed for residential and private use. After years of working on commercial-grade systems, he believes the methodologies refined across fifteen hybrid installations can be adapted to serve homeowners and small businesses – a market segment that remains underserved despite growing demand for energy independence and sustainability. At the moment, there are still very few accessible and comprehensive solutions for this segment, which makes it a compelling space for innovation and development. It is a field Port expects to grow significantly in the coming years, offering major benefits in terms of energy efficiency, resilience, and environmental impact. Whether the broader market follows that logic or keeps searching for candidates with the “right” resume is another question. But for the segment of the energy sector that actually builds and commissions plants, the answer has been obvious for a while: the skills are transferable, the demand is real, and the people who can do the work are closer than most recruiters think. Transitions are already working, right now, inside PLC cabinets at cement plants and defense facilities around the world. Renewable energy just hasn’t figured out how to recruit them yet.