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.'"

Comments

Sounds Good.

[smpoole7]

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.*

Re:Sounds Good.

[grumling]

Back when I climbed telephone poles for a living (and had the body that goes along with it), I regularly climbed towers for our amateur radio repeater network. Once you're in place and tied down, the work is actually fairly easy. But we had a lot of ground support (and ropes and pulleys) to do the heavy lifting. But the first time you go above 50 feet or so it gets a little unnerving.

Re:Sounds Good.

[vlm]

I regularly climbed towers for our amateur radio repeater network

Been there done that although I am more of a weak signal VHF operator.

Another issue is also the weather. Light breeze with two feet on the ground turns into OMG freaking hurricane 100 feet up. Both psychologically and meteorologically. Hams have the luxury of waiting for a perfectly calm day. The real tower workers earn their dough on the bad weather days.

Re:Sounds Good.

[hot soldering iron]

Working my way through college in Kansas, I worked for the college as a student employee. One part of my job was to climb the towers for maintenance. We had several 50 footers, a couple hundred footers, and the main tower was 500 feet. I actually had a plane circle the tower below me one day while changing a light bulb.

As a student employee, I had very little skills or knowledge, and a bit of competition for any job. I got paid $7.50/hr wither I was sitting at a workbench or climbing a tower. God, I was so stupid. Carrying tools up was like weightlifting on a StairMaster with the chance that somebody would put a bullet in your head at any second. The tower had been there about 7 years, and most of the guys that had erected it were dead. There is an incredible mortality rate for tower workers. One of my friends was climbing when a chunk of ice fell and hit his hard hat, almost knocking him unconscious. There were so many dangers, it was literally "criminal" to put an uninformed kid on it. You could die from falling (blown off or a rung rust through underneath the paint), electrocution (you're on the tallest metallic structure for miles, and lightning strikes even in clear skies), and impacts (falling ice and broken metal parts or antennas).

Back in the early '90s the going rate for tower climbing was a buck a foot, and it would take a full hour to climb and descend the 500 footer. So $20/hr to go up, fix it, and climb down? Kiss my ass. I have skills and experience now, I don't have to risk my life for that insultingly small amount of money anymore.

It's just an average-paying job

[Anonymous Coward]

'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.

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.

Re:hmm

[chill]

Because if you do that, nothing better will come along. The rate for the jobs that come along will start to align with the lower rates.

This is what caused the unions to form to begin with. Large, dangerous industry like mining and manufacturing, paid enough for people to survive but not enough for them to ever prosper. It was a form of "voluntary" indentured servitude.

If everyone got together and demanded better conditions or raises, they would get fired and replaced with the never-ending line of people desperate just to survive. Only by striking and creating a picket line to actually shut down business would any real change ever get made.

For a modern example, see the stories on Foxcon and China. We in the West gape in horror at the working conditions and pittance for wages. But compared to the other options -- subsistence farming, etc. -- it is fantastic. If a worker doesn't toe the line, they're fired and replaced with any one of the teeming masses desperate to escape the crushing poverty they now live in.

Yes, it can go too far. See the auto industry and the various stories about Teacher's unions where people clock in, then punch out for a 5 hour lunch, etc.

But the whole "take the cut for now because something better will come along" doesn't scale.

That's a load of bullshit, sir.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

4 week training?

[Drakin]

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.