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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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
The American ones were hounded out of existence because wind power was seen to be on the wrong side of politics.
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.
Plants, like everything else, evolve for the environment they exist in. Increased CO2 only increases plant yields within a fairly narrow band - the same band that's existed for the past twenty million years or so. Outside that band it harms plants, too little harms them obviously but so does too much - just as living in an excessively high oxygen environment is harmful to animals.
Of course, if the oxygen level changes significantly - animals do evolve to live in the new ranges, but that takes millions of years, pretty much everything that lived beforehand dies off - and new species replace them. The last time there was a huge change was in the carboniferous era - the evolution of wooded plants produced plant matter that nothing at the time could digest, so when those trees died, they didn't rot and return their carbon as carbon-dioxide and take the oxygen they had produced back out of the atmosphere - they just lay there until they got buried by geology.
Those trees became the fossil fuels we use today.
But they had an impact on the environment, not being carbon neutral they pushed the oxygen level way up - it peaked at almost 40% of the atmosphere. Basically every animal that had thrived before the carboniferous went extinct - and evolution produced new animals that could live in that environment. Book lungs became a lot more efficient and we saw giant insects thriving. There was a dragonfly with a 1m wingspan, and it's likely that the biggest arachnids of all time lived then - it was the one time in history it was possible for a spider to survive if it's much bigger than a tarantula because the atmosphere was so oxygen rich. Sadly spiders don't fossilize well or often so we don't know if there WERE giant spiders, but it's likely.
Eventually new bacteria evolved that COULD digest wood, trees began to rot - and gradually the atmosphere returned to an in-balance level of about 21% oxygen. All the giant insects and arachnids promptly went extinct as their lungs simply could not breath at this new lower level.
The same is true for plants, massive changes in the CO2 level only increase yields for a little while - beyond a given point it greatly REDUCES yields.
We're evolved for the world as it is, within a fairly narrow band and with very gradual change. Rapid change like we're doing now is a nightmare. Sure we could probably adapt, it's probably not an extinction level event for us - but it's going to be massively disruptive. Millions, perhaps billions, will die. Most of them killing each other for resources.
Look at the political fallout that just a few million refugees have caused in Europe (where, in a population of over a billion - they are a rounding error). Can you imagine the outcome of BILLIONS of refugees ?
It's easy to say we can 'adapt' - it's insane to think adapting will be cheaper than replacing fossil fuels, and it's REALLY insane to think it will happen without massive loss of life.
Humanity will (probably) survive, but civilization DEFINITELY cannot.
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.
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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 ]
Agreed, but it does have everything to do with the parent post I was replying to.
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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...