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Chinese Company Offers Free Training For US Coal Miners To Become Wind Farmers (qz.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: If you want to truly understand what's happening in the energy industry, the best thing to do is to travel deep into the heart of American coal country, to Carbon County, Wyoming (yes, that's a real place). The state produces most coal in the US, and Carbon County has long been known (and was named) for its extensive coal deposits. But the state's mines have been shuttering over the past few years, causing hundreds of people to lose their jobs in 2016 alone. Now, these coal miners are finding hope, offered from an unlikely place: a Chinese wind-turbine maker wants to retrain these American workers to become wind-farm technicians. It's the perfect metaphor for the massive shift happening in the global energy markets. The news comes from an energy conference in Wyoming, where the American arm of Goldwind, a Chinese wind-turbine manufacturer, announced the free training program. More than a century ago, Carbon County was home to the first coal mine in Wyoming. Soon, it will be the site of a new wind farm with hundreds of Goldwind-supplied turbines.
hahaha. i am hilarious.
it was just training and companies were expected to do it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
So just who is "bringing the jobs back to coal miners"? Trump, or the Chinese wind company?
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Coal is a fantastic safety blanket for energy. There's enough coal in the USA to power the country for a century. The problem is that currently, there's no way to do it in a manner that is both cost-effective and clean, so those turbines look like a good idea.
It's worrying however that a Chinese company is ready to establish a beach head in Wyoming for wind power. China spends *a lot* of money on green energy research, more than the rest of the world combined, but their country still relies heavily on coal and they hate it.
This looks like a classic Inkjet printer scam. Give away the thing that looks valuable, and then milk the locked-in customers.
lucm, indeed.
China Outsources Technical Jobs to U.S., Chinese Workers Outraged. "I can't compete against the wages an out-of-work coal miner will accept!" said one. "This is just another way America is driving our economy down," said another, adding "They have too much control over world exchange rates, too. They're cheating us out of our future!" One proposal being discussed in political circles is to end U.S. participation in the Chinese Lunar Program, which is already providing cheap energy to much of the world.
When you build a turn key project in another nation you need some local help to ensure it is complaint, protected and keeps working.
Look at the fence, is the installed hardware working, report any fault numbers if the network fails.
Report any issues with the fence. How to replace or repair the fence to some correct US standard.
Have a number to call for experts to repair any real faults. Having access to report on colored lights or read back error codes locally if a network is not able to report such issues.
How to plug a laptop in, enter a pass word and phone back the list of results.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
This shows one of the major problems with wind farming, the things are high maintenance.
Other problems - when you need power it may not be available, When you have power it may not be needed.
When you change from one to another you hope that there is improvements not actually getting worse.
Wind has the advantage of Govt subsidies and of course it jacks the price of real power which has to be on standby when the wind is blowing in case the output drops. On standby means running and turning the power straight into heat.
It looks like Chinese communism is doing more for American workers than American capitalism has done for them in a long time. #MAGA
Actually over the last few years there's been a mini boom in Rawlins (the county seat of Carbon County), Wyoming. The boom wasn't coal (that's been long gone except for some small coal liquification projects), but in Uranium mining in neighboring Sweetwater County. I guess retraining uranium miners doesn't have the same "green" backstory that the press wants to write about.
It's *really* windy there all the time, so back in 2001, one company built a windfarm in nearby Medicine Bow (111MW farm), and there are many more under construction in the area. I wonder if this Chinese company simply can't find enough workers in the area and wants to train some.
FWIW, my family has been in Rawlins since the '50s and really there are only 3 big employers in the area: Railroad, Sinclair refinery, and the State Penitentiary. Rawlins used to be a big stop on US highway 30, but when they built the I-80 bypass, the town died (kind of like in the fictional movie Cars, Radiator Springs used to be a big stop on US highway 66, but when they built the I-40 bypass, the town died). My grandpa sold his (ironically chinese) restaurant just after the I-80 bypass was completed in the mid '70s. The town has never been the same since.
Just because he was a KKK member doesn't mean he didn't do some good. I voted for him many times, but wind power will not work here.
Is wind farming environmentally friendly if the farmer has all his cows farting at the wind turbine?
That word hurts me head. Was it so hard to add the word "technician" to the end? Or a John Deer tractor technicans grain farmers too? If anyone is a farmer of green energy it's most probably the people lying on the beach. At least their body converts the sun energy that hits them into something. But even then they would probably be Vitamin D farmers.
http://savetheeaglesinternatio...
large birds are an integral part of the global ecosystem. The extinction of the large living birds may have unpredictable consequences for life on Earth.
Vestas was (is?) the world's biggest wind turbine manufacturer, and it is based in Denmark. Vestas has factories in the United States. GE is a big wind turbine manufacturer, and based in the United States. The United States does not need other corporations for wind turbines. For all the derision of Texas, we have good wind sites, and we are building it up. No big talk of 'carbon emissions', but if we can replace some coal and oil with abundant wind, then good.
And the ground nesting birds cheer loudly as their main predator is kept at bay by the turbine.
See, not everything is doom and gloom.
Yes yes but what is Trump doing to help laid off American IT workers who trained their H1B replacements?
A lot of Democrats were/are KKK members since they're the ones that supported slavery while the Republicans ended it. That doesn't mean everything they did is bad.
Wow, they'll even pretend they care about the environment if that's what it takes to make the opposing party look bad.
Political tragics are so fucking ridiculous especially hard rightwingers. To them values and morality are nothing but talking points to be discarded when inconvenient.
Can we get onto something technical about the topic instead of stupid political games with astroturfing fake eagle lovers?
Let me see if I got this straight...
A corporation is offering free training to people without requiring any work in return. The same Yanks who always whine about how corporations should be allowed to do as they please without fear of consequences think this is bad. Does this mean what you really hate is anything that's good for plebs, or did I miss something?
I have nothing to do with politics. I really like eagles, herons, etc. More correctly I like to watch them to soar above a city where I live.
It is not only extremely beautiful, but it is also like canary in a coal mine https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki... . It means the air is clean, there are enough of trees in parks, and we are doing well.
I do not fancy a world of only rich people, rats, and cockroaches left.
I think the better question is, why aren't American wind-turbine companies doing the same? Hell, what about other American renewable energy companies doing this? If we look bad it's because we are bad, and it takes foreign companies to make the point.
http://savetheeaglesinternatio...
large birds are an integral part of the global ecosystem. The extinction of the large living birds may have unpredictable consequences for life on Earth.
Step one: Find out how many eagles there were in the US in 1850.
Step two: Find out how many eagles there were in the US in 1950
You will find that the eagle population started plummeting long before we began building wind turbines.
You are of course correct that turbines are not great for birds. But you know what? Neither is pollution.
Never look a gift horse in the mouth unless it is from the Greeks or the Chinese.
And most are still pissed at the Republicans for ending slavery.
Really?
Seriously?
Honestly?
Then have you ever heard of an eagle getting killed by a windmill any time in the last few hundred years? Be honest this time.
Also WTF is it with the utterly irrelevant link - distraction?
for it being called "renewable".
Somehow the Reps will credit this outcome to Trump's open, business-like, forward looking and win-win policies towards China.
Well I assume you're driving a major effort to get cats banned ? Because cats kill more birds in a day than wind farms do in 10 years.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
>Gee... I wonder why that would be? Could it possibly be because of 'catastrophic man-made global warming' alarmists? Sorry - 'climate change' alarmists?
Nope. Firstly that group of people don't EXIST (the term 'alarmist' is not accurate unless the threat isn't real) and secondly the decline of coal had nothing to do with them anyway. That was driven entirely by the availability of cheap natural gas. Which fucking sucks for people who want something done about climate change since gas is only a tiny bit cleaner than coal. We'd rather have NEITHER - but we didn't kill coal, we wish we did, it got killed by a cheaper fossil fuel.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
...and yet you're on the side of ditching environmental regulations and species protection -- which are the only reason there are any eagles left. If legit, please reconsider; if a concern troll, please shoo.
For the record, the Audubon Society supports wind farms. Because while they kill birds, coal kills far more, between direct and indirect effects. Now, of course, they insist on proper siting and proper measures taken to minimize bird deaths, and work towards strong laws on this front. But they do support and advocate for wind power.
You're treating a symptom while the disease rages on. The fish rots from the head. Why not cut off the head?
Isn't it cute how some people think blogs are scientific references?
Uranium mining is seriously dirty business, it's by far the most environmentally destructive resource to mine - mining coal is bad, but uranium mining is worse.
Luckily, because uranium in a fission reactor yields about a couple of million times more joules per kilogram when compared to burning coal in a plant, you end up needing mine overall less of it.
(Still you need to reduce that factor by around 5x ~ 6x, because it it need to be a little bit enriched to work as a fuel (0.7% natual to 3-4% fuel)).
I'm not saying the Uranium is clean.
I'm just saying that, whenever you speak about nuclear fission (or even nuclear fusion if that thing eventually takes of one day, before we've managed to drive ourselves into extinction), you have to keep in mind that the total amount of mass considered for a certain amount of energy is several orders of magnitude lower.
Or another angle to consider things :
Coal requires millions times more mass than fission to produce energy.
Coal contains radioactive isotopes, even if the quantity are very tiny. (Well like anything in nature, actually)
But we're burning such an absurd mass of coal and dumping all its outputs in the environment (ash),
to the point that the radioactive content of coal starts get significant.
And research shows that coal is actually producing more radioactive waste than nuclear
But yeah in the end if we manage to go solar/wind/hydro, it's even better.
But until then keep in mind that because of the quantities involved, environmental impact (both pollution and radioactive waste) isn't straight forward.
Ultimately both industries have another major advantage over coal as a local keystone industry: a lot less people dying young from blacklung.
I agree with that.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
As opposed to the eagles being naturally immune to air pollution, not suffering of black lungs, etc. ?~
Pollution kills animals too.
Wind farm actually kill a lot less of them. But you just notice the killing better because all of them happen at the same place.
As opposed to pollution which is killing a couple orders of magnitude more animals, but is killing them silently and spread over a larger territory, so you're less likely to notice it.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
It doesn't matter whether anthropogenic climate change alarmism turns out to be valid or just a false alarm. Either way, nasty filthy POLLUTION from coal power plants sucks massive goat balls. I grew up near a ("modern", "clean") coal power station. It was still dirty as fuck. You don't need to be a trendy baizou shrieking about how the sky is falling, to be an environmentalist. Pollution sucks, it's that simple. As some religious folks like to say, it is proper for man to be a steward of the earth, not an exploiter. Does that mean we can turn off all the coal plants tomorrow? Not realistically. But does it mean we should be moving as fast as possible to clean renewable energy? Damned straight it does.
A cat does not attack an eagle, they do a lot of damage though to smaller protected birds.
American companies have ceased investing in workers. They view workers as disposable. Rather than take a solid capable worker and invest in expanding their skillset, they prefer to find younger workers with the existing required skillset, or to import them via H1B Visas.
There is so little training or skill investment by corporations, so little time off thus preventing U.S. workers from training themselves. U.S. workers are used and discarded.
So the irony here is that a Chinese firm is saying to itself, these coal workers are hard workers. They're knowledgeable and skilled in their area. This means they work hard and they can learn. We can use that, and then use them for in-roads into Western nations and markets.
Rather smart...
whoever thinks this is good program is totally confused and does not get corporate world. This is only good for 2-3 years to get people off coal, keep them busy the close all jobs due to "robotics" or some other nonsense and those poor guys will have no coal and no wind. Modern wind turbine farm is almost hands off/autopilot operation and no technicians are necessary. This program was developed with initial money loose in mind, to close all mines and "transition" people to something else, without looking too far. Very similar tricks were used to close down thousands of small farms in Europe - that is how you kill competition. People should look further than 6 months ahead.
Of course the Chinese company wants them to agree to only use their products and services.
Wind farms are hugely inefficient, and recent studies have shown many to ultimately consume more energy over their lifetime than they produce. The optimal solution for this area is upgrading inefficient coal plants, reducing regulations, and reopening 'shuttered' plants. China is building more coal plants than anyone in the world. The climate change alarmists refuse to recognize that the models they base their premise upon are wrong, proven wrong, and have not worked to fix the seriously flawed modeling. Climate change alarmism is a huge business, and will be difficult to shut down with all the propaganda spewed into the atmosphere.
... since gas is only a tiny bit cleaner than coal...
Its actually a lot better than coal. CO2 emissions for burning anthracite is 228.6 pounds CO2 per million BTU and 117.0 for natural gas, or almost exactly half as much. And for other pollutants (which affect air quality) the difference is much larger than that - zero sulfur emission, zero particulates.
But offsetting the sharply reduced CO2 emissions is the fact that methane is a potent green house gas itself, so source to furnace leakage must be kept low, but the necessary low rates have been demonstrated in practice (below 3.2% is needed to be superior to coal, 1% had been demonstrated). Natural gas leakage is a much bigger problem with fueling vehicles that stationary power plants (which is why natural gas fueled vehicle is not the way to go - electric is).
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
As they are full of wind.
Do you still drive a car that burns petroleum products ?
The cost of wind farms destroying the vistas, views, scenery, experience of wilderness or vastness, the reduced/eliminated draw of tourism is also not included in wind farm costs.
Taking energy out of a moving flow, reduces the moving flow, slowing the wind. This also has an impact which is ignored.
Most things done just a little are hard to see all or long term impacts so are viewed as 'cleaner'.
And most are still pissed at the Republicans for ending slavery.
And yet they voted for Trump
...farts is a paid job?!?
"I'm a dirty white tomcat, enter my world..."
> A cat does not attack an eagle,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4Yx1KXQMCM
Not driving it, like a friend who has shot hundreds, but not a fan of feral cats either.
That doesn't matter really compared with people choosing stupid excuses to tilt at windmills as a proxy for politics.
At the moment I'm lucky enough I don't have to drive a car. =). But I'm not sure I understand your point. Yes, fossil burning cars cause pollution. Yes, our society should try to get off fossil fuels ASAP. I guess that means we agree, AC?
Why didn't we think of that?
Oh, wait! We DID have a party running for office with those ideas! Bernie Sanders!
His "Socialist" program was far more Democratic that the Chinese version!
Why the fuck didn't you vote for him?!?!?!
(You know who you are!)
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Ca 1995 I attended a presentation by group of "educators" offering (for big bucks) to train unemployed Navajo loggers to be software engineers in 2 years. My bosses were quite impressed. The Navajo Nation badly needed jobs to maintain the small logging community they'd invested in 10 years earlier - when logging was a sure-thing. Haha.
Turning ex-miners into wind farm technicians sounds a tiny bit more feasible.
Private and public institutions' neglect of providing job training to un- and under- employed workers is yet another neglect of duty. Shame!!
.
Do us a favour and get with the program! YOUR electric company disasters are costing us problems here in the U.S.: "A news report says Japan's tsunami-ravaged nuclear plant was so unprepared for the disaster that workers had to bring protective gear and instruction manuals from elsewhere and borrow equipment from a contractor. The report, released by operator Tokyo Electric Company, is based on interviews of workers and plant data. It portrays chaos in a desperate and ultimately unsuccessful battle to protect the Fukushima plant from meltdown, and shows that workers struggled with unfamiliar equipment." ap.org/ - "Scientists have found traces of radioactivity in fish off the California coast that migrated from the waters off of Japan, site of the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster of 2011, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The researchers say the evidence is unequivocal. The young tuna were found to be contaminated with two radioactive forms of the element cesium from Fukushima." http://content.usatoday.com/co... - "Japanese whalers caught 2 animals along the northern coast that had traces of radiation from leaks at a damaged nuclear power plant, officials said. 2 of 17 minke whales caught off the Pacific coast of Hokkaido showed traces of radioactive cesium, both about 1/20th of the legal limit, fisheries officials said. They are the first whales thought to have been affected by radiation leaked from the Fukushima nuclear plant since it was hit by a 3/11/11 earthquake and tsunami." - http://www.newser.com/story/19... http://www.newser.com/story/20... http://www.newser.com/story/17... http://www.newser.com/story/23...