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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.
Trump is supplying the wind.
:-)
When Trump heard about this and was told they needed the wind to blow hard he claimed he was the biggest blowhard ever, a great big beautiful blowhard, the biggest blowhard that has ever been in government.
It's not just for their employees, they're offering this program to unemployed coal miners as well.
lucm, indeed.
I recall retraining was Clinton's solution to this specific skill gap problem, so Trump will hate it and do all that is possible to sabotage it. Effective training (free for the unemployed minimizes adoption costs) does a better job of putting unemployed coal miners back to work than Trump's practice of subsidizing industry with bribes. This will face even more opposition because now the Chinese are the ones showing that his poorly conceived approach doesn't work, but the only ones who will take damage from sabotage are the currently unemployed coal miners.
It's not just for their employees, they're offering this program to unemployed coal miners as well.
Apparently with the hope that these unemployed miners will provide support for Goldwind turbines where they live. This is a loss-leader for the company, but IMHO, it looks like a win-win-win for Goldwind, the residents of Carbon County, and the environment.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
What exactly will Goldwind "milk" from the residents of Carbon County, Wyoming? Wind turbines don't require a continuous supply of products to keep them going, like inkjet printers do. Okay, they will need maintenance, but it's not like Goldwind will be sending them a bill for the wind.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
When I was young US experts designed computers that other US engineers used to design power projects for the rest of the world.
US factories then worked from US plans and US workers made the hardware from US materials. US engineers then installed the projects in other nations and returned for upgrades and support.
The jobs and profits all stayed in the USA. Investments in US education then ensured better computers and more US jobs.
US experts in the USA did everything from computer design, the needed industrial computer programming, the designs, building and installation.
Thats what US workers should demand. The entire work cycle from computer design and coding at a US university to the worlds best engineering to production and support.
Not looking after another nations profits from a turn key project.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
in engineering college, the foreign kids were sitting in the library on Friday night of a holiday weekend while most of the natives were out partying.
The families of foreign students sacrifice a great deal to send their children to Western schools. The "foreign-devil fees" are much higher than for domestic students. If foreign students don't go home with As, they go home shamed.
Being a foreign student in a Western school is a brutal existence. Show them some compassion.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
30% of revenue from energy production is equal to maintenance costs? Over what period, unit lifetime? In what environment? Regardless, to determine value you must compare whatever failure rates to energy produced in best, worst, and most frequent conditions. You can approximate the beta distribution with the triangular distribution and with reliability engineering you can find expected time until a repair event. Then you can figure out how likely each individual unit is to break even, and beyond that to produce profit. Those are the metrics of greatest interest, and given that market trade is the mantra of modern China that is the only motive required. All others face the test of reality vs paranoia.
Give away the thing that looks valuable, and then milk the locked-in customers
For the inkjet scam to work there can't be viable alternatives. How do they make money ultimately, turbine maintenance (something they control)? Or the wholesale energy price (something completely out of their hands).
Bullshit. This study, which is already old and out of date, puts O&M costs at 20-25%. With the newer, larger offshore turbines, that figure will be lower.
Did you collect your check from the Koch Brothers for posting that falsehood?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Don't worry, lucm was lying about that figure.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The problem with that is economic. The US is something of a victim of its own success: A high standard and thus cost of living, substantial rights for workers (though less than in Europe), environmental protections, health and safety regulations. These are all things that raise the cost of industry. It's cheaper to manufacture things at a smog-spewing, peasant-killing factory in China or Vietnam or even Mexico and ship them to the US than it is to manufacture them there. You could try to distort the market in the favor of US domestic industry through the use of import tariffs and such measures, but then you end up locating businesses in economically sub-optimal locations and suffering the resulting cost increase. You might get to enjoy a new all-American car, but you'll be paying twice as much for it. This applies to government too: Would you rather they spend a billion dollars of tax money contracting a Chinese company to build something, or two billion to use only American suppliers? How are you going to justify this needless extra spending?
The American ones were hounded out of existence because wind power was seen to be on the wrong side of politics.
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?
Clinton brought us NAFTA. Remember, the "giant sucking sound" as what little remained of American heavy industry was literally packed up and shipped to low wage countries.
There's enough coal in the USA to power the country for a century.
And there's enough wind in the USA to power the country forever.
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?
Who would have thought that Edumacation can help to generate overall revenue in a "win-win" scenario? Wow.
Perhaps we should all somehow centrally contribute to this concept, and provide a free education to all of those who are displaced by technology and innovation profoundly changing the way we do things?
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Trump is supplying the wind. When Trump heard about this and was told they needed the wind to blow hard he claimed he was the biggest blowhard ever, a great big beautiful blowhard, the biggest blowhard that has ever been in government. :-)
That's surprising ?!? I would have thought Trump's knee jerk reaction upon hearing that a Chinese wind turbine company is unfolding an evil plan to destroy America's coal industry with unfair competition would be to put a 30% import tariff on wind, enact a special tax to kill off domestic wind production and make it illegal to move wind across state lines?
Trump will never pass a tax that his own activities are liable for. I
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
It isn't about hard work (well it isn't the only factor)
Many of these foreign kids are studying on Friday night because their language skills in American English isn't the same as the nationals. So the lecturer classes are mostly a waste of their time, while for the American students those lectures are the key source of the information so they don't need to study as much.
Then you have the fact most foreign students are often top of their class in their country. If they weren't they would likely be going to their local schools.
Hard work is treated like the key factor. But it is just a modifier of a bunch of other factors.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
No No NO!!! You are not looking at it correctly. It is a slight against el Presidente Tweetie's Coal Initiative by those naughty Chinese. What is the Coal Initiative? That's where the U.S. takes off environmental restrictions so Big Coal can get on with the business of fouling America's air, water, and soil. If these workers start making a living in the wind industry, they they won't be available for coal's resurgence. To make things worse, it means less wind coming out of el Presidente Tweetie's mouth.
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.
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>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 *
Yes, but you have to pay a lot of people to run around with matchbooks.
A century isn't very long.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Yup. There's a magic lever in the oval office and Trump's going to find it any time now.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Beyond what everyone else is pointing out: no, wind is not baseload; it's intermittent. But:
1) Intermittent + Peaking = Baseload
2) Intermittent + Storage = Baseload
3) Intermittent + Hydro uprating = Baseload
4) Intermittent + Different kind of intermittent = Less intermittency
5) Intermittent + Geographic diversity = Less intermittency
6) Current grid = Demand intermittency (aka, we're already used to dealing with the situation, just in reverse).
Yes, high wind penetration means better grid interconnects and/or more peakers. But wind is so damned cheap now (contracts on new wind farms in the US averaging around 2,5 cents per kWh) that you can afford to invest in better interconnects and peakers. Which does everyone a service, because it makes your grid more reliable with conventional baseload plants or existing links go down. Solar, by contrast, is more expensive than wind (the cheapest new contract in the US being 4 cents per kWh - although places outside the US are under 3 cents). But solar, in addition to pairing nicely with wind (the latter peaks when the sun is down, the former when it's up), actually reduces peaking demand at low penetrations (offsetting the daytime peak, and corresponding roughly with cooling needs), and doesn't require as extensive peaking at higher penetrations.
You're treating a symptom while the disease rages on. The fish rots from the head. Why not cut off the head?
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?
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 ]
Canada did. That giant sucking sound wasn't north and south, it was all south. The town(now city) I grew up in is just getting back on it's feet from NAFTA sucking all the jobs to Mexico. Just like those jobs were sucked from the US to Mexico. Canada is attractive to companies in the US because input materials cost less in bulk here then the US. Our dollar is 30% generally under the greenback. But when you can pay someone in Mexico $1.10/hr vs $15-18/hr in Canada and $8-15 in the US? Those companies are picking up and going to Mexico.
Now we've got governments that don't believe blue collar work is worth anything(Liberals of Ontario). Believe that paying for "green energy" is great even though it accounts for 40-50% of your electric bill but generates less then 17% of the input. Even non-blue collar companies are looking at MI & NY in the US or QC and MB in Canada. Where they're not paying 4x the rate they would be now.
Om, nomnomnom...
He already did. It's called a telephone.
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.
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...
For the reasons you pointed out, the term base load is no longer relevant for modern grids. /. ers not even grasp in its historical meaning.
It is a historical term, most
Over a course of a day the load (or demand) follows a certain curve. Over the course of a year, you realize the curve never drops below a certain level (different in every country and varies slightly by season)
Then obviously energy companies came to the bright idea: lets build some super cheap plants that burn super cheap fuel and run them at 95% 24/7. And that we cale base load. As it is the base of the load curve.
Obviously it is completely irrelevant if I produce my base load with fluctuating wind or constant running nuclear or coal plants.
For the load balancing plants it does not matter at all if they are orchestrated around demand change on a fixed base load or on supply change because wind provides base load.
In Germany a big deal of base load comes from wind meanwhile, traditional 24/7 95% plants get powered down. They need fuel. Obviously you power them down if you have "free wind" instead for base load.
Unfortunately americans especially but other /. ers too, are to dumb to grasp that.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.