BILL STOVALL LOOKS LIKE the kind of guy you’d expect to see blazing through town on a Harley chopper. His head wrap bears a grisly skull-and-crossbones design, and a tangled thicket of white hair bursts from its fringes. Opaque sunshades, lambchop sideburns, and a walrus mustache frame a full, reddened face. His forearms are a splotchy brown mosaic, pummeled by years of exposure to the sun.
In fact, Bill’s motorcycle sits in the garage at his home in Gatesville, just west of Waco, Texas. “I ain’t rode it in a year and a half!” he tells me with a low, rumbling laugh. Bill is a long-haul trucker, one of hundreds now delivering turbine components to wind farms across America. He works for Lone Star Transportation, a company based out of Fort Worth whose trucks feature telescoping trailers for transporting blades, low-riders that allow giant tower segments to slip under highway overpasses, and multi-axle decks that can carry nacelles, each weighing a hundred thousand pounds or more.
Bill and I meet at a railroad yard in Reynolds, a small town in northwest Indiana. This is the depot where blades, tower segments, and other turbine components are being held until they’re needed at the construction site for the Meadow Lake Wind Farm, a 200-mega-watt power plant that may eventually be expanded to five times that size. Bill’s trailer is loaded with a Vestas V82 blade, 130 feet long, that stretches his truck-trailer combo to 168 feet—well over twice as long as a conventional semi-trailer. He pulls to the edge of the access road, steps down from the cab of his bright-red Peterbilt truck, and walks to the spot where a heavy steel rod, the “kingpin,” holds the trailer in place. Turning a crank, he lowers two steel legs so that he can yank the kingpin and “dolly down” the trailer, leaving it standing overnight while he drives off to get a decent night’s sleep at a nearby motel. Tomorrow morning before seven o’clock, he will come back to pick up the blade and deliver it to the Meadow Lake Wind Farm, twenty miles away in a flat stretch of farm country just north of Lafayette.
Now in his late fifties, Bill has been a long-haul trucker for years. He used to deliver fresh meats and produce, but for the past few years he has worked in the wind industry. The hours are long, and the time away from home is endless. It’s late July, and he tells me it’s been sixteen weeks since he’s had a single day at home with his wife. Before that, he was on the road for nine weeks. “So I’ve actually been gone twenty-five weeks with one day at home,” he says. And last year was worse. “I drove from May to December and never got home.” His wife visited him twice on the road. “That didn’t hurt,” he says with a smile that vanishes as quickly as it appears. His kids are grown, but he has five grandkids and one great-grandchild; rarely does he see them.
What keeps Bill going, along with the wages, is pride. When he was delivering meats and produce, he saw himself as performing an important, if little-recognized, service. “You go into the stores now and everyone wants fresh lettuce and eggs and fresh meat, and there’s a whole lotta old boys out on the road that go to a lot of trouble on a regular basis to make sure that stuff is there every day.” There’s dignity, not bitterness, in his tone.
Wind energy brings Bill equal pride. “When I go by these wind farms, I think, ‘I did my part of that. I can see that.’ ” He’s boned up on the basics of how turbines work, the power they produce, the fossil fuels they displace. “I found out [one turbine] puts out electricity for a thousand homes, pays for itself in five years, and lasts fifty—not a bad deal!” His reasoning is plain: “We don’t buy the air. Somebody might start chargin’ for it, but for now, it sounds better ’n coal.”
The next morning, I set out from my motel at 6:30. My goal is to catch the nine-vehicle convoy that Bill will be joining: three trucks carrying one blade each, plus six escort vehicles—one in front of each blade truck, one behind. Blades travel in matched sets from factory to wind farm, their weights carefully measured to make sure that every turbine has a well-balanced rotor.
The fog is so dense I can barely see fifty feet ahead of me as I make my way south on I-65. Eventually I spot blinking orange roof lights on a green Ford pickup truck in the right-hand lane. Ahead of it, I make out the contours of a giant white blade. Moving into the left-hand lane, I edge by one trio of trucks—escort, blade, escort. Then I pass a second trio, then a third. The caravan is cruising at a surprisingly swift clip given the poor visibility: about fifty miles per hour, just slightly slower than the general traffic.
Bill calls the forward escort for his blade truck his “front door” and the rear one his “back door.” The back door has the tougher job: its driver has to steer the rig’s rear axle remotely from a few dozen feet behind the truck, using a handheld electronic device that looks like a simplified TV control, all the while keeping his own vehicle on the road. It makes texting while driving seem easy.
The advantage of having a double-escort becomes obvious when we pull off I-65 and negotiate a tight left turn onto an overpass heading east on State Road 18. Before the blade truck enters the turn, the front-door driver hops out of his minivan and uproots the stop sign at the end of the exit ramp. Otherwise the blade’s tip would level it on its wide swing around the ninety-degree turn. The back-door driver then navigates the turn, keeping the blade truck’s rear axle heading straight while the cab veers off to the left. Once the last blade has made its way around the turn, the trailing escort replants the stop sign.
A few miles down the road, the three blade trucks followed by their rear escorts peel off the pavement to the right, edging slowly onto a semicircular dirt path that allows them to make another ninety-degree left-hand turn. Completing the arc, the trucks head off into a fogbound sea of shoulder-high green corn. The front escorts, unneeded at this stage, stand idle in a grassy holding area while the trucks unload their wares at the foot of a nearby turbine tower.
A friend who has dug into National Archives photos from the Cold War tells me these wide-swinging turnoffs remind him of the aerial surveillance shots that tipped off U.S. intelligence to Cuba’s installation of missiles in the early 1960s.1 There were no giant wind turbines then, so what else would Fidel Castro have been moving around the countryside?
For the blades and other turbine components that have made their way to the Meadow Lake Wind Farm, the 25-mile ride from the Reynolds railroad depot is the final short leg of a very long journey. Some of the blades have come by truck from a Vestas factory in Windsor, Colorado, 1,000 miles due west. Others were shipped out of Aarhus, Denmark, destined for the Port of Burns Harbor, Indiana, on Lake Michigan’s southern shore. The journey across the Atlantic, down the St. Lawrence Seaway, and through four Great Lakes covers 4,500 nautical miles and takes about fourteen days. Although each load is different, the ship that brought in Bill Stovall’s cargo carried 94 blades, 30 power generators, and 30 hubs.2
Arduous though shipping from Europe may be, the hands-down long-distance medalists at Meadow Lake are the towers. Purchased from a supplier in Vietnam, they were shipped in sections across the Pacific to the Port of Vancouver, Washington, on the Columbia River just north of Portland, Oregon. That leg of the trip racked up well over 6,000 nautical miles. The next leg took them on flatbed railcars cross country to Indiana—about 2,200 miles. At the Reynolds rail yard, I watched as twinned pairs of tall cranes gingerly lifted these multi-ton tubes off their flatbeds and aligned them in neat rows down the full length of the yard. Hundreds of tower sections rested on heavy-gauge steel cradles, each stamped in bold black lettering: “Made in Vietnam.”
With increasing numbers of companies—foreign and domestic—opening up manufacturing and assembly plants on American soil, trips carrying turbines from factory to farm may soon be shorter. That comes as good news to equipment manufacturers and wind farm developers alike, as transportation accounts for about 10 percent of the cost of building a U.S. wind farm.3 But for now, wind energy is big business for shipping companies and the ports they use. Ports up and down the West Coast, from Longview, Washington, to San Diego, handle massive shipments coming from Asia.4 Along the Gulf Coast, five Texas ports—Beaumont, Corpus Christi, Freeport, Galveston, and Houston—serve as wind technology gateways.5 And in the Upper Midwest, the Great Lakes ports of Burns Harbor and Duluth enjoy an increasingly brisk wind trade. Ports along the eastern seaboard are not yet major players in the wind industry, but that may change if offshore wind farms are built in the Atlantic, as is expected in the coming years.
Railways are also busy moving turbine components from ports and factories to their ultimate points of use. The Union Pacific is already moving thousands of carloads of wind turbine components from ports and assembly plants to wind farms annually, and it is prepared to handle up to 6,000 railcars loaded with wind equipment at its logistics center in Manly, Iowa.6
Though rail haulage is gaining momentum, trucks will remain at the center of U.S. wind technology transport. Needed, in any case, for carrying turbine components their final miles to construction sites amidst cornfields and cattle pastures, they are less cumbersome than rail for most trips shorter than several hundred miles. Shifting heavy loads from one transportation mode to another simply isn’t worth the cost, time, and effort if the distances aren’t truly great. Even when land travel is long, wind developers often opt for trucks, especially if they are carrying big-diameter tower segments that can’t make it through railroad tunnels or super-long blades that require the use of two specially fitted railroad cars per unit. Looking at land traffic coming out of the Port of Longview, the proportions are telling: 90 percent of the turbine components leave by truck.7
All of this gives plenty of work to people like Bill Stovall, who are now busy, year in, year out, moving wind energy equipment from ports, railroad depots, and factories to wind farms across the country. Beyond the haulers, thousands more have found work at wind farm construction sites, readying access roads, pouring turbine foundations, erecting towers, and installing electrical systems. And then there are the thousands of people who will operate and maintain the wind farms for decades to come.
I arrive at Meadow Lake, Bill Stovall’s destination, to find half the wind farm’s 121 turbines already standing tall. Meadow Lake’s developer, Horizon Wind Energy (the same company that built Meridian Way) has dispatched two familiar veterans to supervise construction: Carole Engelder and Alvin Cargill.
Carole flew in last night, held meetings all morning, and slipped away at lunchtime without my catching so much as a glimpse of her. We had planned to meet here, but I think she has come to regard me as one of the “gnats” she complained about back in Kansas, getting in the way of expeditious project development.
Alvin, Horizon’s on-site manager, is more courteous. He takes a few minutes to speak with me in the company’s field office, a minimally furnished trailer that sits in a row of identical white mobile offices housing the administrative staffs of the half-dozen firms most directly involved in building the wind farm. The trailers are lined up like dominoes at one end of the laydown yard, a graded dirt expanse where concrete is mixed, gravel and other construction materials are stockpiled, and dozens of construction crew pickups are parked alongside fuel trucks and road graders. Hanging from a sturdy chain-link fence surrounding the yard is a banner displaying the general contractor’s slogan: “WORK SAFE! Your family needs you.” These words remind me of a visit I paid to another construction site, at the Grand Ridge Wind Farm just outside Marseilles (pronounced mar-SALES), in Illinois. There I stood in spring rain alongside Adam Hartman, the fresh-scrubbed site manager for Invenergy, a Chicago-based wind developer. Almost directly above our heads, a 42-ton tower segment was dangling from a 300-foot crane. Adam assured me that serious accidents are rare at wind farm construction sites, but he indulged in a bit of gallows humor as he touched the plastic rim of his hard hat. “We call these brain buckets,” he said, explaining with a smile that they’re particularly useful in scooping up cranial matter in the event of a major mishap.8
About 350 workers are involved in building the Meadow Lake Wind Farm. Alvin breaks that number down for me. Bowen, the general contractor, has just over a hundred people on site doing “civil” work. Along with grading, widening, and reinforcing the access roads that are spread across tens of thousands of acres, they have poured all the foundations for the turbines.9 An electrical subcontractor, Hinkels and McCoy, employs about the same number, digging tens of miles of trenches and laying electric cables that will eventually carry power from turbines to the grid. Once the civil and electrical infrastructure is in place, Barnhart Crane & Rigging comes in with about ninety workers to do the heavy lifting—stacking and securing the tubular segments of each steel tower, topping off each tower with a nacelle, and hoisting three-bladed rotors into position. Vestas is also on site with a few dozen technicians who make sure the turbines’ mechanical, electrical, and hydraulic systems are working properly.
Pouring foundations not only demands a sizeable workforce; it also consumes formidable quantities of concrete and steel. At Meridian Way, I recall being told that each foundation contains 525 cubic yards of concrete and 40 tons of steel rebars, woven and then poured in the shape of a giant inverted mushroom. Emerging from each concrete base are the threaded tips of 144 eleven-foot-long bolts, arrayed in a dense double-ring that will be used to secure the lower tower section.10 Between these enormous bolts and the hundreds of shorter ones that hold upper sections of the turbine together, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) estimates that in 2008 alone, wind developers used 2.4 million oversized bolts to erect about 5,000 turbines.11 No wonder Cardinal Fastener, Ohio’s custom-bolt manufacturer and home of the “Obama Bolt,”12 sees wind energy as such a promising new market!
Alvin arranges for me to spend the morning with Steve Maples, site manager for Barnhart Crane & Rigging. In the Barnhart trailer, Steve introduces me briefly to Clint Newbold, the company’s on-site quality assurance manager. A former Marine, Clint grew up on a ranch in South Dakota and was working for a county road department when Barnhart hired him. He tells me the company recruited heavily from his corner of South Dakota. When I asked why, he belts out his answer: “Because we’re good! We’re hard workers. We like to get the job done. We’re no-bullshit individuals.”13 With eight people assigned to his staff, Clint keeps close tabs on every Barnhart work crew operating at Meadow Lake, making sure they adhere to a rigorous set of performance guidelines.
Steve and I then hop into his pickup and set out through croplands on a matrix of ramrod-straight, unpaved county roads. Filling our field of vision are dozens of turbines, all planted in unwavering lines running along an east-west axis. Some are fully erected; others are white steel stumps waiting for upper tower sections, nacelles, and rotors to be lifted into place. Beginning our drive at row D, we head south at a good clip, leaving a wall of light-brown dust in our wake. Fifteen minutes later we arrive at row K; this first phase of the wind farm continues through row Q. I can only imagine how vast the fully built wind farm will be.
Phase I of Meadow Lake will deliver 200 megawatts of wind power to the grid—enough to meet the power needs of about 55,000 Indiana households. Horizon’s land man, Martin Culik, tells me that the project could ultimately reach 1,000 megawatts, supplying 275,000 homes with clean energy.14 At that scale, it would be the largest wind farm in the state by a wide margin, stretching across 130,000 acres, covering a quarter of White County and spilling over into Benton County, to the west. 15 Flat as far as the eye can see, virtually all of this land today is planted in corn and soy. In the near future, it will be corn, soy, and windmills.
As he turns off the county road onto a dirt path through the fields, Steve tells me that Barnhart lured him out of retirement back in 2005. He will only volunteer that he’s “well past fifty,” but my guess is he passed that milestone many years ago. Barnhart first hired Steve to oversee construction at a wind farm in upstate New York; he had previously managed projects for a mechanical and industrial contractor in Tennessee. He’s happy to be working again, and he’s pretty sure his wife is happy to have him out of the house. “It gives her a break from me,” he jokes, but then his tone turns earnest: “You spend all your life workin’ and all of a sudden you’re not, and all your friends are still workin’. You need somethin’ to do.”16
Supervising Barnhart construction crews more than answers that need. Cranes are costly to rent, and keeping workers fed and housed runs up a hefty tab as well. All of that makes six-day workweeks routine, sometimes including double shifts and occasionally even spilling over onto Sundays. “Some days I wonder what I’m doin”,’ Steve admits, but he quickly adds: “Other days I know, after a few weeks, I’d be extremely bored [sitting at home]. . . . All those years dealin’ with plant managers and workers. I need that camaraderie in my life.”
The close company Steve enjoys is palpable as we sit in his truck and watch one of his Barnhart crews “fly a rotor,” or lift it into place, connecting it to the turbine’s main shaft atop 255 feet of steel tubing. It has just started raining. Sheets of water are pouring off the corrugated metal roof of a nearby barn, but the wind is calm and there’s no lightning in the area, so the work goes on.
A dozen men team up to fly the rotor, which has been preassembled on the ground by bolting three blades to a hub. (Barnhart has no women on its field crew at Meadow Lake, though Steve explains that’s only because the Ironworkers Local hasn’t sent any along.) Four men are on the ground, and four more are atop the tower. It takes a crew of two—a Barnhart operator and a union apprentice called an “oiler”—to manage the Manitowoc “triple 9” crane, mounted on tank tracks with a 300-foot, elbow-jointed boom. A single operator runs a smaller wheel-mounted crane, used to stabilize the rotor as it’s lifted. And then there’s the quality assurance supervisor from Clint Newbold’s shop. “It’s A-A-A-L-L-L about teamwork,” Steve yells to me above the crackling of his two-way radio and the revving of crane engines. “Nobody’s gonna like everybody, but you work as a team. You’re only as good as the people you’re surrounded by.”
This seems particularly true when you’re raising a 46-ton rotor that’s broader in diameter than a Boeing 747 is long. A lot can go wrong if any member of the team isn’t properly trained or is less than 100 percent alert. Most vulnerable, perhaps, are the crewmembers high in the tower who must guide the rotor, foot by foot and then inch by inch, as it approaches its docking position at the outer tip of the main shaft, protruding just slightly from the front of the nacelle.
The Manitowoc’s engine howls as its cable becomes taut, tugging on the upper rim of the rotor’s hub. Two blades rise, forming a perfect V high in the air. The third blade points straight downward, the smaller crane holding its tip just a few feet off the ground. A few dozen yards away, two men stand in a cleared stretch of cornfield, each grasping a rope looped around the tip of an elevated blade. With these slender tools, they hold the rotor steady as it rises into the air slowly, majestically. This is the largest kite I’ve ever seen flown.
Twelve long minutes into this operation, the rotor hovers with its hub slightly higher than the nacelle. The rain has let up, and Rusty Fitz gets ready to guide the rotor through its final stages of flight. He is visible high above us, ant-sized, peering over the front edge of the nacelle like a sailor looking out from a ship’s prow. He begins issuing radio instructions in a Louisiana drawl: “Luffin’ up, brother. Luffin’ up.” Rusty wants the crane to lift its upper boom slightly, creating a little more space between rotor and mount. Thirty slow seconds pass as the crane operator gently shifts the rotor’s position.
Rusty then calls out to one of the ropers in the cornfield clearing. “Comin’ in on my left tag,” he says, looking for a bit less slack in the line. Another twenty seconds pass. “Alright on my left tag, comin’ in on my right.” The other roper complies. Then to the crane operator: “Gimme a little cable down. I want ’bout eight, nine feet of cable down.” The crane lets out some cable and the rotor descends. After a “skootch” to the right and another to the left to finalize the alignment, the first bolts are fastened between the main shaft and the rotor.
Stepping out onto the hub, Rusty disconnects the crane’s cable. Even with a safety harness, this is no job for the acrophobe. As the freed cable rises, he sounds euphoric: “Alright there, Big Daddy, all clear. FINE JOB! FINE JOB!”
With the rotor flown, Steve takes me back to the laydown yard in his pickup. Next in line at the turbine site, Hinkels and McCoy will come in and hook up all the electrical systems. Then the Barnhart quality assurance team will make sure everything’s ready for a walk-through by the owners. In a few months, he expects all 121 turbines to begin sending wind-generated power to the grid.
Steve doesn’t sound overly sentimental when he talks about his “five aggravatin’ grandchildren.” He admits, though, that he’s proud to be playing a role in opening America’s horizons to wind, and he hopes that someday his grandkids will say, “Grandpa had somethin’ to do with it.”
Erecting turbines has its challenges and risks; so does maintaining them. Those looking for a cushy desk job need not apply for any of the thousands of operations and maintenance—“O&M”—jobs that are opening up at America’s wind farms. I learned this the hard way during an earlier visit to Cloud County.
To experience what wind technicians undertake a few times daily, I felt it was important that I try climbing a turbine—straight up a series of narrow aluminum ladders inside the tower to the hatch on the underside of a Vestas V90 nacelle, 262 feet in the air. My folly should have been obvious from the start: I am mildly claustrophobic, vaguely uncomfortable with heights, not particularly robust, and, to echo Steve Maples, “well past fifty.”
Before setting out on the climb, I was given basic instruction by Meridian Way’s operations manager, a two-tour Iraqi war veteran named Justin Van Beusekom, burly, sun-baked, his lower lip bulging with chewing tobacco. First, Justin had me review a multipage release form outlining the hazards of working up-tower, from hypothermia in the winter to dehydration and heat exhaustion in the summer. Then he fitted me with a hard hat, protective glasses, gloves for a better grip, and a harness heavily laden with clips and straps. I was already wearing the mandatory hard-toed work boots, purchased the previous day at Walmart.
As we drove to the turbine, Justin distracted me by talking about two of the local wildlife dangers listed on the release form: rattlesnakes and the small but surprisingly venomous brown recluse spider. With a slight flair for exaggeration, he warned that the spider’s bite can cause a finger to “swell up and explode.” As for rattlers, I needed no convincing: the previous day, I had seen one slither across a packed-dirt farm road just a few feet in front of my car. In truth, though, my mind was on neither spiders nor snakes; I was girding my nerves for the climb.
At the site, Justin keyed in a command to pause the turbine’s operation; no one goes up-tower when the rotor is turning. We entered the tower through a rounded, shiplike steel door, a few steps off the ground. Inside the air was dank with the smell of grease and plastics. Following Justin’s instruction, I latched my harness, with its fallarresting clamp, to a cable running up the center of a short stretch of ladder to a grated steel platform just overhead. Getting to that first platform was easy. Then came the next span—about fifty feet straight up into near-total darkness. And beyond that, I knew, were two more spans covering the remaining distance to the top—nearly 200 feet into a cavity that would be shrinking from 12 feet across to only 7.5 feet in diameter at the top. I also knew that magnets were all that held these slender vertical spans to the tower’s interior wall—a means of preserving the maximal strength of this giant steel tube.
With every step I took, the temperature seemed to rise and the air became heavier, more stagnant. For several hours the sun had beaten down on the tower’s exposed steel, warming it through and through. I tried not to look up; I tried not to look down. My arms strained, my thighs ached, my heart was pounding. Panic overcame pride; I knew I couldn’t make it.
I half-expected a soldier’s scolding when I called down to Justin to say I’d had enough. Instead, he calmly coached me through the mechanics of the descent. As I exited the tower through its narrow hatch, I felt a huge rush of relief that left little room for humiliation.
Back in Horizon’s field office, I untangled myself from the web of harness gear and shared with Justin what my two teenaged daughters had said when I told them about my planned climb. “Are you crazy?” one exclaimed. The other insisted: “You’ve got to do it if you’re writing a book about wind.” Justin smiled and responded: “They were both right!”17
My awe for the rigors of O&M work only deepened on my visit to the Grand Ridge Wind Farm outside Marseilles, Illinois. Leo Jessen is wind developer Invenergy’s point man at this 99-megawatt project, supervising a crew of six O&M technicians. A clean-shaven head and fashionable earring somewhat mask his years, but at forty-seven, Leo is older than the other members of his team. Though still relatively quick at climbing turbines, he pithily observes, “There’s old climbers and bold climbers, but no old bold climbers.” It’s all about pacing, he claims. “You might be in the greatest shape in the world; you might be able to run up the ladder; but you’ve got to understand that, when you get to the top, you’ve got to do the work.” A young buck who races up the ladder in five minutes and then collapses in exhaustion for forty-five is less valuable, he says, than someone who takes twenty minutes to make the climb but then gets right to work.18
Ladders on the GE turbines at Grand Ridge are equipped with counterweights that can reduce technicians’ effective climbing weight by as much as 50 percent. Leo stresses, though, that technicians typically carry at least forty extra pounds in tools and safety gear, so getting to the top of a tower still demands real effort.
Weather extremes, up-tower as well as en route, impose further physical stress on O&M technicians. Mechanical heat quickly dissipates when turbines are shut down, leaving workers aloft in winter temperatures that can easily drop below zero. In summertime, the temperature inside a nacelle—ventilated but not air-conditioned—often tops a hundred degrees. “If you’re a TV dinner, this is the ultimate job for you,” Leo says. “You’ll freeze in the winter and cook in the summer.”
What do O&M technicians cope with, aside from the weather? First of all, turbines—like any machine—require scheduled maintenance. Gearboxes need periodic oil changes, using specially equipped pump trucks to siphon off the old oil and pump in the new. Grease must be applied to the gears that control the pitch of turbine blades and the mechanism that changes the “yaw,” or compass orientation, of the rotor, both of which are constantly adjusting to optimize rotor speed under different wind conditions. Also needing periodic checking and replacement are brake pads, used along with blade-feathering to hold the turbine still during maintenance and, in a pinch, to help keep the rotor from spinning out of control. Then there are the gearbox failures, generator misalignments, electrical defects, hydraulic control issues, and other non-routine problems that have to be handled as quickly as possible to minimize the time and cost of taking turbines out of production.
Leo’s goal is to keep the Grand Ridge turbines operating as close to 100 percent of the time as is physically possible. In its first half-year of operations, the turbines performed at 98 to 99 percent availability—the term used to reflect the percentage of time that a turbine is fully operational, or available to capture the wind. 19 Leo attributes this very high availability to the fact that the equipment is still new, but it also reflects the responsiveness and training of his O&M crewmembers.
Demand for well-trained O&M technicians, on-site managers, and administrative support staff at American wind farms has been growing, but the rate of that growth has been directly affected by fluctuations in the U.S. economy. In 2009, new wind installations totaled nearly 10,000 megawatts. Although the economy had already slumped, turbine orders placed before the recession allowed the industry to maintain a brisk rate of development that year. To service the turbines that went on-line in that year alone, AWEA estimates that 1,000 new O&M jobs were created.20 The recession took its toll on wind development the following year, however, cutting newly installed wind capacity in half and substantially reducing demand for new O&M hires. Wind turbine technology has also become more reliable with every passing year, making it possible to spread O&M crews more sparingly across ever-larger turbine arrays.
Even with these market fluctuations and technology developments, the need for trained technicians has been big enough to nurture a new generation of specialized training programs at more than two dozen centers of learning across the country.21 Cloud County Community College’s story is emblematic.
When Bruce Graham gave up his high school teaching career to launch Cloud County’s wind program in 2007, he had to work hard at building faculty support. With only four students in his program, he had an uphill burden of persuasion. Before long, though, the school’s top administrators came to embrace Bruce’s effort as their poster child. Students were coming from several states across the lower Midwest, and money was flowing in—about $1.8 million in federal grants and nearly $1 million in state funding.22 “Wind has become our icon,” the college’s vice president for academic affairs proclaimed in March 2010.23 Today, Cloud County’s Wind Energy Technology Department has more than a hundred students enrolled in its two-year program, taking courses that run the gamut from mechanics, hydraulics, and electronics to turbine siting, worker safety, and data acquisition. With an associate’s degree in applied science, they emerge primed to enter a job market where they find themselves competing with a growing cohort of well-trained technicians, many of them coming out of similar programs at places like Iowa Lakes Community College.
You can tell that the wind industry has penetrated the national ethos when a community college’s training program for wind technicians is featured on a prime-time TV ad. That is exactly what happened when a commercial for Duracell batteries showed young guys in hard hats climbing a turbine and inspecting circuits, with the voice-over saying: “At Iowa Lakes Community College, the students learn to keep America’s wind turbines going. And to keep them safe, the only battery they trust in their high-voltage meters are Duracell rechargeables.”24
The Wind Energy and Turbine Technology Program at Iowa Lakes is housed in an attractive modern building on the college’s campus in Estherville, a small village in the northwest corner of the state. This is a far cry from Cloud County’s temporary rented quarters, shoehorned between the Dollar General store and the Dragon House Chinese restaurant in a Concordia strip mall. Ahmad Hemami, an instructor in the fundamentals of electricity, guides me through a half-dozen well-appointed teaching labs and a nearly equal number of classrooms. In the labs, students gather around electronic control boards, computer monitors, and wind-measuring anemometers, looking up only briefly as we walk through.
Ahmad then takes me to see a Vestas V90 nacelle, neatly mounted as a floating classroom in a courtyard just off the main corridor. I climb a single short ladder leading up to the suspended capsule and finally get to eyeball what I would have seen if I’d completed my climb at Meridian Way. The nacelle’s cramped metallic interior feels like a cross between a submarine engine room and a space shuttle cabin. To make room for students, there is no main shaft running the length of the chamber and other large components, such as the gearbox and generator, have also been removed. Even so, the nacelle is a crowded maze of circuit boxes, electric motors, hydraulic hoses, and cooling fans to keep workers and machinery within a bearable temperature range. It’s not hard to imagine how tightly packed a nacelle must be when filled with all the machinery that’s needed to turn motion into power.
Iowa Lakes may be in a remote corner of a rural state, but from a wind technology perspective, it’s in an ideal spot. Aside from having its own fully functioning wind turbine just a half-mile from campus, the college sits in a region that is replete with commercial-scale wind farms. “They’re right smack-dab in northwest Iowa, where we need all the technicians,” says Clipper’s Bob Loyd, who sits on the Iowa Lakes board of advisers and is an enthusiastic booster of the program. The college also enjoys easy access to technology leaders at larger educational institutions like the University of Iowa and Iowa State. Barry Butler, dean of the University of Iowa’s College of Engineering, is unstinting in his praise for the program and is in awe of the program’s physical plant: “The laboratories they have are just enviable, even by our standards,” he says. “I’d love to have some of the equipment they have.”25
Among the students at Iowa Lakes are seasoned tradespeople like Joe Brightwell and Richard Dunham. Joe was a unionized electrician in Montague, Michigan, until his work dried up with the collapse of the housing industry.26 Richard was a general contractor in Atlanta. When the recession devastated his business, Richard was already in his early fifties, yet he coolly set about searching for a new career. As a first step, he decided that he wanted to work in a field that would draw on his university training long ago in mechanical engineering. Next, he surveyed different energy technologies, ruling out several of them as less-than-promising employment prospects. “I wasn’t convinced that nuclear power was going to come back, and there’s already a lot of people in coal,” he reasons. “So I looked at the alternative energies. Of course, wind seemed to be the most viable, and I knew it was something I would be interested in because there’s a lot of mechanics as well as electrical work.”
Though sold on wind, Richard is far from a true believer when it comes to climate change. “People are being persuaded falsely that there is a traumatic experience that’s going to happen in the next fifty to a hundred years, like glacier melting and so forth,” he says with obvious derision. On the other hand, he disdains coal company profiteering, loathes American reliance on Middle East oil, and believes that tapping the wind is an important way to secure American energy independence.
While students like Joe and Richard have already logged in decades in the technical trades, most Iowa Lakes trainees are young, barely out of high school. Paul Johnson is one of them, coming to Iowa Lakes after a short stint at a small college in North Dakota. The valedictorian at his hometown high school in northern Minnesota, Paul has a little trouble squaring his current studies with the expectations built up over his high school years. “In high school, these technical programs were kind of frowned upon,” he acknowledges. “It was expected you could do better.” He tells me that he hasn’t managed to get any of his high school classmates excited about wind power, yet he speaks with animation about the industry’s value in creating well-paying rural jobs. Growing up on a small farm with two parents who needed outside jobs to make ends meet, he is painfully aware of the strains facing family farming and has a sober respect for the difficulties in finding new local jobs to fill the vacuum.
Wind developers make a point of hiring local labor wherever possible. They know that when county commissions and economic development agencies weigh the pros and cons of inviting a new wind farm into their communities, the promise of new jobs will be a major consideration. Construction crews like the one led by Steve Maples at Meadow Lake have large contingents of workers hired through local unions. O&M teams like Leo Jessen’s at Grand Ridge also draw from neighboring areas; Leo himself grew up and now lives in the town of Ottawa, Illinois, a dozen miles from the wind farm field office.
While many of the workers on wind farm construction crews and O&M teams are local, few of them are women. Project development teams often include women in supervisory and administrative roles; Carole Engelder is one example. But in the field, they are a rarity. At Meadow Lake, there were none in Steve Maples’s ninety-man-strong construction crew. At Grand Ridge, I observed another construction team that included just one woman slogging through puddles on a rainy spring day, brushing and hosing mud off tower sections that had been lying in the fields. Meanwhile, the men busied themselves with their big machines, hoisting the freshly cleaned steel tubes into place.
On the operations side, Michelle Graham is an interesting and unusual hybrid. On one hand, she juggles a range of roles in the Meridian Way field office. She prepares daily reports on turbine availability, wind conditions, and needed repairs; she leads informational tours of the wind farm; and she maintains constant ties with the wind farm’s participants and abutters, making sure they aren’t caught off guard when an O&M crew goes out to repair a blade or replace a gearbox.
At the same time, Michelle has worked hard at defining a useful role for herself up-tower. To do this, she first had to get over her aversion to heights, so she began practice-climbing up a twenty-foot ladder that her husband Bruce—a wind instructor at home as well as at Cloud County Community College—had lashed to the side of their barn. “I strapped on his climbing harness and climbed up and down that ladder fourteen times,” she told me. Afterward, she collapsed on the couch, her body exhausted and her hands blistered. That was in July 2009. By December, she had reached the top of a Vestas V90, where she spent several hours learning how to audit the services performed by O&M technicians—making sure bolts were tight, oil and grease levels were sufficient, and conditions were clean. Today, with her fears behind her, Michelle views up-tower quality assurance auditing as part of her on-the-job repertoire.27
Rare among workers in the field, women are nearly absent from the student rolls at technical training programs. At Cloud County Community College, only four out of a hundred students in the 2010–11 academic year were women.28 The previous year, Iowa Lakes had just five women enrolled in its program.29
One of them was Loma Roggenkamp, a native Pennsylvanian who came to the wind energy field after trying her hand at marine biology in Maine. “I thought the ocean was our final frontier, and we were going to find things to save the world out there.” Unable to land a job that drew on her studies, she worked in a graphics firm for several years. Then one day her mother spotted a wind technology ad on the Internet, and Loma immediately went online to explore possible points of entry. Training would be needed, she knew, and Iowa Lakes kept coming up as a great place to gear up for a career change. Soon she enrolled in the college with her family’s blessing.
Immediately on graduating from Iowa Lakes in June 2010, Loma was snapped up by Siemens Energy to work as an O&M technician. First she was dispatched to Houston for three weeks of training; then she was sent to her “home farm,” a 200-megawatt facility in Glenrock, Wyoming, 5,000 feet above sea level. At Top of the World, as the wind farm is fittingly called, Siemens operates forty-four 2.3-megawatt machines—just over half the farm’s installed capacity.
In a phone call at the end of her first day up-tower, Loma’s exhilaration is palpable. An athlete, she relishes the climb—nearly 300 feet straight up. “I can climb every day, and I don’t have to pay for a gym membership!” she quips. And then there’s the view. The Siemens nacelle opens like a clamshell, giving workers a stunning vista onto the surrounding countryside. “I can troubleshoot a turbine and look at nature at the same time,” she says.
“I’m making a difference and I’m needed in this industry,” Loma tells me with confidence and pride. That difference isn’t just advancing a technology she believes in; it’s helping women find safe and welcoming pathways into the wind energy workforce. Not surprisingly, much of the safety training for O&M technicians is focused on men; she wants to help develop training guidance for women. “Men aren’t the only ones with appendages that are vulnerable,” she says. Along with opting for the greater comfort of a safety harness configuration shaped like an “X” rather than an “H” in the chest area, women need to be cautioned not to wear flammable synthetic undergarments that can melt and adhere to the skin in case of fire.30
Loma is now working with a nonprofit group, Women of Wind Energy, to develop these training materials. She has found an enthusiastic ally and supporter in Kristen Graf, the organization’s executive director. Kristen attributes the dearth of women in technical jobs partially to the stereotype that these sorts of positions are traditionally the domain of men. Women don’t necessarily hear about wind energy training and hiring opportunities, so opening up the flow of information about schools and jobs is one needed step. Even for those women who stand up to the stereotypes, surmount the often-subtle biases, and get hired, Kristen says that working conditions built on a male culture can sometimes be unwelcoming and isolating. “Some women are good at playing the role of being ‘one of the guys,’ ” she observes, “but that shouldn’t be a requirement if you have all the skills needed for a particular job.” Her goal, and that of her organization, is “to be more proactive in creating a working environment that fits everyone.”
At least as troubling to Kristen is the underrepresentation of women in higher-level corporate positions. Women of Wind Energy, which has thirty state chapters and a few additional branches in Canada, provides fellowships for women to attend the AWEA annual meeting, a multiday conference and trade fair that draws tens of thousands of participants each year. Newcomers to the job market get easy access to wind energy employers at these gatherings. Kristen describes Denise Bode, CEO of AWEA, as “a real champion” in raising the profile of women in the industry.31 Even with those efforts, there remains a very large gender gap in wind energy management—a gap that is reflected by the composition of the AWEA board: out of twenty-eight members serving as of April 2011, only five were women.32
Jeanna Walters, a Cloud County graduate who has gone on to pursue a bachelor’s degree in environmental science at Kansas State, sees the challenge facing women in wind as beginning with the school system. “We really need to push the science and math on girls in high school,” she insists. Even if women don’t want to end up working in construction or climbing turbines, she is sure that opportunities abound for women in engineering, land acquisition, development oversight, financing, operations management, and marketing. “This is definitely an industry that girls can be involved in—and should be.”33
It’s hard to predict how many U.S. jobs a thriving wind energy sector might provide in future years, but that hasn’t kept the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) from trying. In a report called Wind Power in America’s Future: 20% Wind Energy by 2030, it looked at the prospects for generating electricity from wind. If wind were to supply 20 percent of America’s power by 2030, the DOE research team estimated that annual installations of new wind-generating capacity would have to reach 16 gigawatts by 2018—an increase, but certainly not an impossible leap from an installation level that came very close to 10 gigawatts in 2009. Under this scenario, total installed wind power nationwide would reach 300 gigawatts by 2030—sufficient to generate a fifth of the 5.8 billion megawatt-hours projected to be the overall U.S. demand for electricity by that date. This is not a formula that optimistically flatlines U.S. electricity use between now and the target date; to the contrary, a 39 percent increase above total consumption in 2005 is built into the calculation.34 If we actually became a nation that valued energy conservation more than we do today, 300 gigawatts of installed wind power could end up providing well over 20 percent of the nation’s power needs by 2030.
Under the 20% Wind Energy by 2030 scenario, manufacturing jobs directly related to producing wind turbine components and subcomponents would top 30,000 by 2021, peaking at 32,835 in 2028. While factory work would somewhat slacken thereafter, ongoing expansion in generating capacity—both onshore and offshore—and the need to re-power aging wind plants would guarantee a continued high level of employment in the manufacturing sector. In construction, jobs would average over 70,000 a year from 2019 through 2030. And in wind farm operations, total jobs would reach 76,667 by 2030—about 28,000 in on-site O&M and another 48,000 in utility services and subcontractors. Adding them all up, DOE foresees about 180,000 jobs directly linked to wind energy as the 2030 target date approaches.
Beyond all the “direct” jobs in the wind energy economy, DOE also explores the “indirect” employment benefits of growing this sector. These jobs include the producers and suppliers of steel, fiberglass, and other materials that are used to build wind turbines; the companies that produce the parts that go into turbine components and subcomponents; and the providers of banking, accounting, legal, and other services to wind turbine manufacturers and wind farm contractors. These indirect jobs are expected to number about 100,000 annually in the years leading up to the 2030 target date.
Finally, DOE draws an even wider circle around the “induced” jobs resulting from consumer spending by people directly and indirectly employed in the wind energy sector. A Clipper factory worker buys a new pair of jeans in a local store; an O&M technician takes his family out to dinner; a crane operator stays at a local motel. The DOE team attributes another 200,000 jobs per year to these induced economic activities.35
Folding induced jobs into the assessment of wind energy benefits may go farther down the speculative road than some are ready to travel. But even setting that outer circle of employment impacts aside, we are looking at a roster that rises to more than a quarter-million direct and indirect jobs if we pursue DOE’s 20% by 2030 goal. A technology commitment that advances America’s energy independence and reduces our nation’s carbon footprint while creating hundreds of thousands of new, skill-based jobs—isn’t this a path worth taking?