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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.*
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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My own equally made-up figures show that wind power costs a hundred trazillion dollars a year.
On the off-chance that you are not trolling... since I'm not interested in writing a dissertation, just go ahead and point out which of these assertions you disagree with:
So, in conclusion, even if only 1% of all medical spending could be attributed to unsustainable fossil fuel consumption, and only 1% of the cost of maintaining the US military benefits fossil energy, and only 1% of the debt saddled on future generations represents the consumption of finite fossil resources, this would still be over twice the cost of *all* current renewable energy subsidies combined.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
"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.
? 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?