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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.
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.
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.
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.
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"but I'd not leave my current $120K+ job in a city"
See, that's not who they're looking for. If you're making $60/hr and have a job, you're not really the ideal candidate. There are something like 15 million workers in the US who currently have near-zero income. Of those 15 million, apparently none of them are interested in this as a job, despite wages which are $20/hr more than they are currently getting paid.
I wouldn't be surprised if 80% of those people could not, for one reason or another, do this job. That only leaves 3 million. If 99% of them aren't willing or able to relocate, that still leaves 30,000 people. And yet the candidate pool doesn't even appear to be that deep.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
...that still leaves 30,000 people. And yet the candidate pool doesn't even appear to be that deep.
They're the dotcom workers of the 2010s and they know it and they're not playing along.
For better or worse you're only as good as the last job on your resume... and if that is a dead industry then its soylent green time for you. On the other hand, if the last job on your resume is "real", lets say "Car Mechanic" or "Carpenter", although you're momentarily unemployed, the odds of being hired in the future are pretty good.
Would I go into a bubbly industry knowing it'll only last a couple years and then I'll never be employable again anywhere at any rate in the future... if I'm 60 then hell yes. The problem is this job requires the physique of a 20-something and they don't want to spend their 30s-60s unemployed.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
Its also a capital intensive job. Back in the early 80s a cool blue collar "retraining" job was cable TV installer. The local vo-tech school had classes and graduated at least a hundred. Once all the hardline was strung up or buried, then.... From personal knowledge there are only about two dozen techs in that field in my area. What happened to the hundred or so other grads? Probably getting career advice to go into the (currently) lucrative windmill business. Endless bubble chasing, thats all the US has to offer anymore.
Retraining is a profitable industry all by itself. Much like the gold rush gold miners never made much money, but the general store types made fat stacks of cash, the place to make money in the windmill industry is in windmill industry training classes, not in windmills themselves.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
Bear in mind where you're talking about relocating to. I've written about this before. The big wind farms like these are going up on the Great Plains which have been in a depopulating spiral for decades. Groceries may be 25 miles from where you live. The nearest health care may be 50 miles away, and the nearest specialist in a particular field you need 100 miles. The school systems and other public services are collapsing. Or alternatively, you live where there are still services and drive 50-60 miles each way to work.
For the large majority of the unemployed, who haven't grown up there, it looks like tossing most of your life away for $20/hour.
$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?
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.
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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.
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
"For the large majority of the unemployed, who haven't grown up there, it looks like tossing most of your life away for $20/hour."
I live in the same region. It is tossing your life away for $20/hour. Actually it's about $15/hour or less after taxes.
It doesn't matter if it's cheap to live here since it won't stay cheap for long after the people move in(been through this) and $20/hour is still utter garbage for high-risk work. Out here services suck, social support is a joke, and competitive income doesn't exist. I'll just throw in the view of hundreds of miles of flat nothing along with tornado hell doesn't ring well for people's positive outlook.
Let's not forget the high cost of just moving here and adjusting to all that nothing and other social losses which isn't figured into the initial first year and not compensated for. The initial pay is for the financially desperate who physically qualify and have a lot of crazy in them.
You could find some mexicans to do it.
I am not being racist here, but in parts of the south they made that much working these jobs and being out of work would gladly accept it.
There is a labor shortage.
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The cost of living is completely different than Denver.
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? Abandoned wind farms?
You'll need to cite some references for this.
Since the main cost of wind farms is the initial capital cost and not the very small annual maintenance cost, it would make no sense to abandon a wind farm once it was running. It's literally free electricity after installation.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I see what you tried to do there, but you failed, because your statement is true.