Control engineering jobs

Control & Automation Jobs in Renewable Energy

Control and automation in renewable energy is the engineering of the control loops, instrumentation, PLCs, and embedded software that make turbines, inverters, batteries, electrolysers, and factories run by themselves and respond to the grid within milliseconds. Almost everything the industry builds is now controlled rather than simply switched on: the IEA expects global renewable capacity to grow by 4,600 GW between 2025 and 2030, and most of it is solar and wind connected through power electronics that behave only as well as their control software.

Machine control at equipment makers

Equipment manufacturers employ the largest group of control engineers. At turbine, converter, and storage companies, they write and test the software that pitches blades, tracks the maximum power point, limits current during grid faults, and balances battery cells, working closely with power electronics and hardware teams. Hitachi Energy hires control engineers for converter stations and HVDC links, where the control system decides how power flows between countries. Listings for this work cluster in the Indian engineering centres of Chennai, Noida, and Bengaluru as well as in Erlangen, Hamburg, and Berlin.

Newer technologies push the discipline furthest. Kitepower in Delft flies airborne wind kites whose flight path is controlled in real time, and fusion developers Helion Energy, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, and Thea Energy hire controls engineers, often with LabVIEW or high-speed data acquisition experience, to run magnets, power supplies, and diagnostics on experimental machines.

Plant and grid control

A second group works where equipment meets the network. Power plant controllers coordinate every turbine or inverter on a site to meet the grid operator's setpoints for active power, reactive power, and frequency response, and they are tested line by line against the grid code before a plant can operate. This work links closely to SCADA, and operators such as Iberdrola, NextEra Energy, and TransGrid hire control engineers and control room operators to run it.

Batteries have become the busiest area. Europe installed 36 GWh of battery storage in 2025, 48% more than the year before, according to SolarPower Europe, taking operational capacity past 100 GWh, and utility-scale systems accounted for more than half of it for the first time. Each site needs its battery management systems, energy management system, and plant controller configured and commissioned, which is why BMS Commissioning Engineer appears repeatedly in these listings.

Factory automation

The third group automates production. Battery cell makers such as Verkor employ automation engineers and instrumentation technicians to program PLCs, integrate robots and vision systems, and keep process lines running, while energy services companies such as Ameresco hire for building automation and plant controls. This work follows the familiar IEC 61131 world of industrial automation, and engineers from automotive, food, or pharmaceutical plants move into it most easily.

Skills that pay

Control theory and simulation in MATLAB and Simulink remain the core for machine and grid control, with C or C++ for embedded targets and Python for testing and data analysis. PLC programming in Siemens or Beckhoff environments is the entry point for automation roles. The premium goes to engineers who understand the physics under the code: why a converter becomes unstable on a weak grid, or how a pitch controller interacts with tower vibration. As grids rely more on inverter-based plants, engineers who can design grid-forming controls, which let inverters hold voltage and frequency rather than follow them, are among the scarcest profiles in the industry.