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Employers Need Wind Power Technicians
Hugh Pickens writes "NPR reports that Oklahoma is one state benefitting from the energy boom. With a wind power rush underway, companies are competing to secure the windiest spots, while breathing life into small towns. The problem is, each turbine requires regular maintenance during its 20-year lifespan, with a requirement of one turbine technician for every 10 turbines on the ground. So even with a job that can pay a good starting salary (for technicians with a GED or high school diploma who complete a four-week turbine maintenance training program), there aren't enough qualified technicians to do the work. 'It seems odd, with America's unemployment problem, to have a shortage of workers for a job that can pay in excess of $20 per hour. But being a turbine technician isn't easy,' says Logan Layden, adding that technicians typically have to climb 300 foot high towers to service the turbines. Oscar Briones is one of about a dozen students who recently finished a maintenance training program after leaving his job as a motorcycle mechanic and now has his pick of employers. 'So I was in the market to find something else to do, and this seemed pretty exciting. Being 300 feet in the air, that's pretty exciting in its self. So yeah, I'm a thrill seeker.'"
If heights is the reason for the lack of people then we have really lost our way. Reference the pictures of the guys building the Empire State Building, are they saying we couldn't get people to do that now? The reality here is either you have an industry that is too new and unorganized, a union that is putting a choke holds on the labor pool, or some other dumb ass bureaucratic reason that is making the country noncompetitive.
I don't climb the towers for our radio stations. I know a few maintenance engineers who do, but they're rare. Tower crews get thousands of dollars per day to do the climbing. Just to relamp our 350' towers at one of our stations costs about $750 per (and we have 5 of them).
So yeah, I can imagine that they're looking for people who will climb 300' towers for $20 an hour. Good luck with that. :)
The law of unintended consequences has a corollary: unintended *costs.*
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
There are over 1000 electricians out of work in my local electrical union. Any of us would be glad to do that work, but they are not willing to pay qualified electricians to do the work.
People say my sig is the best thing about me.
The article is trying to get the public to get behind the idea of wind power by promising jobs.
This is just an industry puff piece.
BTW: here in Denver, entry-level shelf stockers at Costco get $19, so I don't know if $20 an hour is all that phenomenal.
Actually, the average income in the US is $40000 per year, which is about $20 per hour. So, the job is only paying the national average. That's why it's not attracting people from out-of-state, even though the pay is above-average for the state of Oklahoma. See the statistics at http://bber.unm.edu/econ/us-pci.htm.
Ok, I guess I'm dumb, but I'd not leave my current $120K+ job in a city I like (without any wind power) to move to the midwest (I've lived in the midwest and visited OK for a few months), for a $40K job.
Not likely. I doubt most high school grads over 25 would do that either. 80% of the people under 25 will never leave whatever town they were raised in unless it really sucked or they were already from a dying town. OTOH, if they were from a small town already in the midwest, then getting the training and taking the job makes perfect sense. It is better than working in a restaruant and it gets them away from the girlfriend who they've been stuck with all these years. These are the same people who got to Alaska to work in the canneries every year, thinking they will find adventure. go guys, go!
Just reading the headline I initially assumed it to be a project to harness that hot air produced by all those MBAs.
I have heard that there is a nursing shortage too., but that the problem was that there was a shortage of qualified and experienced nurses. Newly graduated nurses apprently were not qualified to do serious work, and as such there is a glut of entry level nurses.
Maybe this is true, but the economy has been bad for years now, and I am sure that if there were sufficient job demand, enough people would retool. I hear that one big problem for returning vets is finding job. I think that if you were willing to serve in a battlefield getting shot at by snipers, a 300 foot climb is no big deal for a vet in his 20-30's. If the training program only lasts 4 week, I think this need can be met very easily.
I see too many stories and anecdotal studies without serious proof. Show me 10K craiglistings for such positions?
All these "Industry X facing chronic shortage of qualified Y" stories can typically be translated to either:
"Profession Y is well paid, and we would like to drive down those wages by saturating the market with graduates"
"Profession Y is a niche / dying trade that we rely on, but running training schemes / apprenticeships hurts our quarterly returns"
In both cases Y tends to be industry specific engineers
Mike Rowe did an episode of Wind Farm technician. Fascinating show. And proved that I'd hate to do it. It wasn't the climbing the ladder, or standing on top of it that was the problem. The nacelles are only just big enough to fit the generator and leave enough room for a midget to crawl around and do the servicing.
The big laugh in that episode was one of the techs telling a story of a snake in the nacelle. Apparently it had crawled in there during construction when the nacelle was on the ground and then rode it all the way to the top.
I can't find a link to the actual video, but it was Season 3 episode 31, "Wind Farm Technician".
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Here is my thought on that. He is getting into a very very very virgin market. Meaning there are things on Wind Turbines that, as a mechanic, you might come up with to make it safer, more efficient, or more robust. Allowing you to invent and patent possible revelation and thus living an American dream.
I kinda envy these new maintenance people.
With the high number of abandoned wind farms I can't say I like the job security aspects of this. It might make a good summer job but I sure wouldn't plan a career around it.
I'm still skeptical that large windmill-style wind generators are the best choice either from a TCO or side-effect point of view. Certainly if I were going to put something on my own land, I'd do same careful life-cycle studies as well as both audio and ground-vibration studies. I would like to see more about vertical turbines, which certainly have a smaller volume requirement and are supposedly much quieter.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A_h2AjJaMw.
Also, it occurs to me that the guys who climb 300' towers should be paid just as much as the 2000' towers, since you're just as screwed in the event of a fall.
Might as well buy a lottery ticket. Most of the really keen folks who would come up with the next new widget and make a million dollars are already making their mark in other fields. Somewhere they're a smart kid out of work that will take a chance on this job, and come up with something cool. He's one in a thousand. Actually there are a hundred of him out there, in fact. And one of those hundred will make it to the American Dream stage. The other ninety-nine thousand will trudge through with $40k a year until the find another job or retire.
Capitalism is depressing if you're not both innovative AND lucky. But it beats never having a chance at all.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
You have no idea what you're talking about.
My grandfather, several great-uncles, and even a couple of my uncles were metalworkers who worked on building the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and many other large buildings in NYC and Chicago. They were white. The majority of the construction crews were white. If you don't believe me, look at any of the pictures of the construction workers building the damn skyscrapers, for crying out loud!
Yes, there were Mohawk metalworkers. My relatives spoke very highly of them and their skills. But they weren't hired because they were cheap labor. They were hired because they had a huge amount of experience building bridges. This valuable experience translated very well to building tall skyscrapers. The fact that they were Mohawk was of no concern. It was their knowledge, experience and abilities that mattered.
The racism your post exhibits is absurd. Your unrelenting hatred for white people is absurd. Your misrepresentation of the Mohawk metalworkers is absurd. If America has "lost its way", it's because people today actually believe the bullshit that you're spewing out all over the place.
...in that you have that much longer to think about what's coming.
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I'm thinking these folks are underpaid & under trained.
I got more training that that as a newly hired first year apprentice with my power company, on top of my apprenticeship board required education. And I still had to work under direct supervision until I got my journeyman ticket.
Unless there's a lot more to it, they're likely not qualified, and you'll see the electrical and mechanical trades start a fuss over it.
That is part of the unemployment problem as well. When you have schools turning out BA, MA, PHD with out the right skills but that same time you have people with out a BA or people with a AA from a tech or community college with alot more skills can't get a tech job do to the lack of BA's or higher.
I am a wind tech. I service and repair these towers. You either are in shape, or will be in shape soon climbing the towers. I climb up to 3 towers a day. The job is extremely cold (or hot, depending on the season), and the work is dangerous. I work directly with power magnitudes from 24DC to 1042DC, and 24AC 1phase up to 690v 3phase. I DO get more than $25 an hour, and most weeks I get about 65 hours. My training includes 2 years schooling, 4 weeks basic classroom tower training, 2 weeks advanced classroom diagnostics training, and 6 months supervised OJT training.
Despite the above, qualified technicians are difficult to find and hire. The companies that hire under-qualified persons (such as exampled in the article) are not worried about their turbine reliability, or their employees.
BTW, most turbine techs around my area get $15 an hour or less.
$20/hr starting salary is roughly 40k a year. Not bad for a entry level position that doesn't require a degree. As to the 4 weeks training remember these are entry level. It seems for some reason the industry has a 1:10 ratio of people to towers, whether that's an actual number of implied by the job postings and number of turbines is unclear. This is an overall number, it doesn't mean that 1 person baby sits his/her 10 towers and is qualified for all situations. Depending what is wrong they'll bring in the people they think can do the job. At $250k+ the company isn't going to just let people have at them. As for the safety, seriously, there was a time when children used to climb into machinery to fix it. Not saying that was right, but good lord have we become boring and unadventerous. Many people actually enjoy heights, or the sense of a little bit of danger. And lets be real here, you don't see on the news every night tales of workers falling to their deaths off of windtowers. The dangers are more perceived than actual assuming the proper procedures are followed. If some of you are married you better watch out, because your wife may at some point look at you, and then look at this guy with a somewhat exciting job 300' in the air and make a rash decision some night.
Wow. What's that, $40k/year?
Why would you bother being a turbine jockey when you could be a tower jockey and get paid a hell of a lot more to fix radio antennas?
I saw a story about turbines off the Dutch coast. They would use a boat to get to each turbine, then tie it up (lock it up too), and then access a small hatch at the base of each turbine. You climb into the hatch, and its an elevator that takes you 300 feet up (tools too). You then work on the turbine, then ride the little elevator down. The elevator is round (fitting the shape of the tower) and about 5 feet in diameter. Its electrically operated, and connected to the big grid, so that even if the local turbine is offline, everything still works. Given that the north sea can be dangerous with wind and high waves, climbing 300 feet was never a good idea anyway. Being inside and riding up is a safer, drier way to get the job done. (At the bottom and top there are platforms to allow safe working conditions). You can still fall, but its a lot harder as the top is basically a cage, so even if its all covered in ice, the worst that can happen is you slip and fall (3 feet) even without being tied off.
every time you hear about 'shortage in industry x', what it really means is that 'industry is trying to lower wages".
why would they want to lower wages? so that they can return more profit to their shareholders, which are big funds and investment banks. it has nothing, whatsoever, to do with a 'labor shortage'. remember the invisible hand of the market? it should take care of 'shortages' just fine. it is funny to see the capitalists decide that capitalistic theory is not 'good enough' for their profit margin, and they need to grease the wheels with massive media campaigns and PR initiatives.
Half my family is in the wind industry, and everyone was laid off last year do to lack of work in the US and Canada. My dad's new job is breaking down and relocating a natural gas plant for 18 months, because there are no international wind jobs to bid on.
$20/hr isn't enough to go 300 ft. in the air. The pay should be comparable to crane operators, which I'm pretty sure earn a lot more. It's not like a turbine has never blown up either. It may or may not be as safe as crane operation as these things begin to age.
OK, crane operators earn $39/hr in Washington DC and $82/hr. Even laborers earn $25/hr in Washington DC. That's probably union pay but if you have the skills and don't mind climbing a tower... which job are you going to persue?
Also the suits are thinking "Oklahoma is a cheap place to live" but many of the workers are thinking "Oklahoma is a boring place to live", unless the already live there. Not as many people live there as on the East coast. Not by far. Also, if you lose your construction job on the east coast your odds of finding another one when the economy picks up are better, and you won't have to move.
I have an uncle who operated machinery in New Jersey. He never moved his whole career. Drove 2 hours to a job site, yeah. Move? Nope. Stayed there his whole career.
$20/hr to go to Oklahoma and possibly have to move, and not be able to clean yourself up and take the wife to the Opera? Fuggedaboutit. They should pay MORE than in New Jersey, not less.
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I wonder about the long-term viability of such jobs.
Inasmuch as wind power is utterly dependent on subsidies that means the jobs are dependent on the political fortunes of the "green" lobby and the various parasitic, private sector entities that feed off their political power, the industry would disappear if the influence of the "green" lobby declines.
It doesn't happen every day but there are more then a few cases of industries, no longer viable or no longer viable in America, using political power to maintain themselves only to see their subsidies zero out when their political power wanes.
The psychtric diagnoses and barrage of invective may now commence.
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
This is the dirty little secret of the wind industry everyone seems to ignore when talking about it as an energy source with little to no down sides. More people have been killed in the U.S. maintaining wind turbines (or climbing improperly secured maintenance ladders) than in its entire history of nuclear power generation. This despite nuclear providing about 20% of our electricity while wind was below 1% for most of that time (it's up to 2.3% in 2010). If we extrapolated wind's fatality rate to the 45% of U.S. electricity provided by coal (1847 of 4125 TWh in 2010), it would work out to over 250 wind-related deaths per year.
Currently, wind is the second-best renewable energy source (after hydro), with cost per kWh within striking distance of that of coal and nuclear (less than twice the cost). But its proponents have got to stop advocating it with rose-colored glasses, and start addressing some of its real problems. This is the reason marketers make terrible engineers - they prefer to ignore and gloss over the problems rather than fix them. Right now, wind is doing what fossil fuels do - reducing their operating costs by offloading risk and damage onto others (mainly their workers). They need to pay these turbine maintenance guys better for the higher risk, provide more robust safety training, and develop and install more safety systems.
It's pretty amazing how fast a labor shortage will disappear when pay and benefits even remotely match skill, experience, and risk of a job. I'd like someone to fix my car and remodel my bathroom for $4 an hour, but for some reason, there is a shortage of certified and bonded mechanics and plumbers willing to take on my simple projects at $4/hr. Ungrateful bastards.
Genius, they've invented Windows.
It looks like they need Linux (or BSD), with only one turbine technician per 100 turbines instead.
-- Terry
The recession of the late 2000's caused a record number of US citizens to go back to school to get more education/training. Now we still have ~20 million unemployed people looking for work and companies are still complaining about a lack of skilled labor?
There are two explanations:
1 - The companies are full of shit
2 - Our education system is failing us horribly and not properly educating/training our workforce.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
First, buckwheat, you don't want people with arts degrees doing this kind of technical work, (BA), you likely want people with a science degree (BSc.). Second, unless you are designing the thing, you don't need a university education anyway (firstly overkill on theory, and not nearly enough practical training). Its easier to give 20 people technical training than to give 1 person theoretical training (cheaper too). Note that while there is overlap, its not as much as you might think. You still need to apprentice people (even if they have a university degree, directly related to the requirements at hand, its still best if they have at least 3 of the 4 years of practical training). Training and education are not exactly the same thing. Training is specific knowledge to be applied to the immediate problem or set of problems at hand. Education is the application of knowledge, to a more universal set of problems, not specific to the immediate problem at hand, and while as effective, not as well tuned or efficient. As someone with a university degree, I would still want to see people still get a 4 year journeyman ticket. It combines detailed practical knowledge of the problems at hand, and experience with the set of tools, processes and procedures plus requirements (both physical and legal) to complete the job both safely and efficiently. I've worked for engineering companies where they absolutely insist on tickets and certifications.
Capitalism is depressing if you're not both innovative AND lucky. But it beats never having a chance at all.
Does it really beat never having a chance at all? Maybe some people would glady accept never having a chance at greatness for guaranteed mediocrity and their wife and kids having food, shelter, and healthcare. It seems less cruel to not string people along with a glimmer of hope and incredible risk.
That is the biggest problem with Capitalism after all, that not everybody wants to be a capitalist.
Add to that that it's a very dangerous job, compared to working in any other type of power plant, even coal-based ones.
adding that technicians typically have to climb 300 foot high towers to service the turbines. Oscar Briones is one of about a dozen students who recently finished a maintenance training program after leaving his job as a motorcycle mechanic and now has his pick of employers. 'So I was in the market to find something else to do, and this seemed pretty exciting. Being 300 feet in the air, that's pretty exciting in its self. So yeah, I'm a thrill seeker.'"
At 300 feet in the air on a pole, you can have wind speeds in excess of 70 km/h when the wind is perfectly still at ground level. And the frequency they have to do it with, how many people that have to do this :
The problem is, each turbine requires regular maintenance during its 20-year lifespan, with a requirement of one turbine technician for every 10 turbines on the ground.
And the fact they get to lug equipment up there while they're at it. Stats for 1 year of wind turbine accidents in the US (2008), and associated fatalities :
41 Worker Fatalities, 16 Public- Includes falling from turbine towers and transporting turbines on the highway.
39 Incidents of Blade Failure- Failed blades have been known to travel over a quarter mile, killing any unfortunate bystanders within its path of destruction.
110 Incidents of Fire- When a wind turbine fire occurs, local fire departments can do little but watch due to the 30-story height of these turbine units. The falling debris are then carried across the distance and cause new fires.
60 Incidents of Structural Failure- As turbines become more prevalent, these breakages will become more common in public areas, thereby causing more deaths and dismemberment’s from falling debris.
24 incidents of "hurling ice”- Ice forms on these giant blades and is reportedly hurled at deathly speeds in all directions. Author reports that some 880 ice incidents of this nature have occurred over Germany’s 13-years of harnessing wind power.
Since there's been a massive increase in installed base since 2008, anyone have numbers for 2011 ?
And yet is still surprises people that wind turbines kill more people than chernobyl every 5 years when you look at the world as a whole. One article claimed they getting close to having killed more people than all atomic bombs combined in mid-2010.
But I'm sure things have changed since then, right ? After all Fukushima killed 5 people since then, right ? (how ? Well : one got crushed by the console of the crane he was working in during the earthquake, 2 were walking outside for a smoke when the tsunami hit and smashed them against the wall, and a clean up worker was found who had died from a heart attack. After the events during cleanup a part of the surrounding wall collapsed on a fifth. 5 people were admitted to the hospital for having been exposed to radiation, expected future symptoms : none)
I see what you tried to do there, but you failed, because your statement is true.
Wind is a huge subsidy fueled bubble about burst. When the government finally decides to balance the budget, one of the items on the chopping block will no doubt be all these subsidies for alternative energy. When that happens there will be no new windfarms, and no further need for wind farm technicians beyond what has already been built.
As a Native American (Cherokee) that worked high steel for over twenty years all around the world and the US. MOST! Ironworkers are white! Yep! A lot are Native yes but your reasoning on why is completely wrong. Very few are black. All Ironworkers do it for the same reason. Its a warriors job that test your physical and mental abilities every minute of the day. Never a dull moment. Mohawks do a lot of Ironwork but it has nothing to do with genetics. Grandpa was an Ironworker, Dad was one too. The Son follows in their footsteps because of respect for his Elders and wants to be like them. Also its a VERY high paying job if you know the craft. Hell I made more hangin iron than I do in IT.
There is a certain freedom being a few hundred feet in the air by yourself the tallest thing for miles just you and the wind. Every Ironworker no matter what race enjoys that. No one looking over your shoulder just you the Iron and the wind.
Ironworkers are a breed of their own no matter what color. All Ironworkers accept each other by their skill not by color. I don't care what color you are you ain't shit on the crew until you prove yourself.