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.

Comments

Re:Huh?

[sit1963nz]

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. :-)

Uranium vs Coal.

[DrYak]

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.

Here's the rub...

[PortHaven]

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...