There is rising demand for renewable power and the promise of government stimulus across Europe and now America. Considering whether to support wind power capacity growth, many people are now asking themselves about a change in career. They are looking to the wind industry as the future in the face of automation and offshoring of regular jobs in legacy industries to low income countries.
You may have asked yourself some of these questions yourself:
What types of jobs are there in Wind?
How are my competencies aligned to the Wind Industry?
How can I update my skill set as I move toward a role in the Wind Sector?
What training and qualification routes are out there?
What if I don't want to work offshore on a wind farm?
To these questions and others, there is some good news. The wind sector has many of the kinds of roles in adjacent and distant fields. For example, because the good wind assets are often in remote locations and offshore, there are a range of maritime and logistics jobs. For those with experience in manufacturing, good news - there is a push for domestic manufacturing in many countries, for many of the components which are needed. This comes as suppliers in all parts of the value chain expand their footprint to cater to nation level demand for wind power.
And for those novices, just out of school, looking at next steps, there is ample opportunity there too. With apprenticeships in the UK and other countries, there are spaces for ambitious, future-minded people like you.
Wind value chain end to end
Let us look at the problem from a sector-down approach to grapple the problem more easily. Looking, or trying to look for jobs in wind on a job-level perspective could lead to frustration because with this new and growing sector, it isn't often obvious what sorts of jobs are out there.
Considering the wind value chain can be an instructive exercise in itself.
Materials - There is a wide spread of raw materials needed to construct a wind farm - whether onshore or offshore. Ranging from bulk commodities like steel and copper, through to advanced composites like carbon fibre, ceramics, etc.
Components - The main categories of components can be reduced down to 5 main categories, reflecting the pieces that you can see and imagine easily when thinking about a wind turbine.
blades and rotor
nacelle and controls (including gearbox)
generator and power control electronics
tower components
Manufacture - production of these elements and combination of the elements into finished units, includes front line manufacturing, QA/ QC testing and QA to de-risk the manufacturing and improve the quality of the products. With advanced manufacturing and future-thinking organisations, it is likely that an element of continuous improvement processes will be in play in these organisations.
Logistics and Operations - Including the local installation work, crane operators, barge logistics. I would also include here specialist installation vessels companies, lease management, workboats and crew welfare modules.
Support/ Requisite Offshore Safety/ Competence Certifications - While every effort is made to minimise risk to workers in the offshore wind sector, it is still a hazardous occupation. Working at height, electrical works, inclement weather, confined space works, coupled with crush injury risk from accessing parts of large machines.
To underpin the work to minimise risk to personnel, there is a slew of training companies which provide all of the training and compliance certification to give assurance to offshore wind businesses that their personnel have been trained to the level that can reduce risk of injury in their work.
Short video of the typical range of offshore safety training services provided by training and certification companies. This is different but a complementary skill set, to that of the folks actually conducting work offshore. Indeed knowledge of proper use of safety systems at sea is a requisite for many offshore operators. Credit: Clyde Training Solutions, UK.This is a critical element because while there are advanced machines to manufacture and install this in site, onshore or offshore, there is still a strong human element, driving machines, rigging lift gear and attaching blades to the hub.
End Use (utilities) - Taking over a commissioned field, including operations, control room operator, transformer / switchgear platform operator.
Some shots of a typical arrangement, scale and size of an offshore HV switchgear and transformer platform serving an offshore wind farm. Excerpt from a wider report from ABB. Credit: ABB Sp. z o.o.
Research and Development - This sector flourishes within the companies in the above categories, however there are also research centres in material science - for new and resilient materials in all components, engineering (mechanical, electrical, aerospace - because of the blades and turbine technology, naval architecture - because of the construction of structures for the marine environment - this will become even more important as deep water floating arrays start to enter the wind fleets.
Furthermore, entities like the UK government invest in research for specific aspects from time to time, sometimes to investigate a special interest. A recent example was a multi-million pound investment to determine the impact and mitigation innovations for the radar interference from wind turbine blades. This is seen as a risk to UK national security because large swathes of near-offshore waters are 'fuzzy' with interference. See my previous article for more on that initiative.
Decommissioning and Re-wind
A newer kind of career but it makes sense, given the full lifecycle of energy generation equipment. Recent research has turned to making greater use of the recycled carbon fibre wind turbines in other applications. Reusing laminated composites for blades is a no go because of the destruction of the long-range 'crystal' structure formed by the composite/ laminate matrix. This gives the strength - similar to a carbon monocoque racing bicycle - the forces are distributed well to give incredible strength, but due to the direction of lamination, only certain force directions are acceptable.
It is well-known in olympic cycling, if a cyclist goes down in a fairly innocuous way, it is fairly likely that their bike can shatter into plenty of carbon fibre shards. A similar concept is applied here with turbine blades.
Rewind is an offshoot of the first-time installation and adjacent industries. However, there is work akin to decommissioning of retired oil and gas platforms. In this area, a wind farm with legacy generation equipment is re-appraised and optimised for greater electricity generation with new equipment. Here an operator can take advantage in the development of newer and more efficient turbine design to either install more, often larger, taller turbines, with longer blades and generators. They can also choose to reduce the in-field connections and infrastructure by opting to construct fewer turbines to meet the supply requirement in their block lease contract.
In addition, there is now also work to reduce the need for human intervention/ human presence on a significant offshore high voltage substation. This can reduce significant amounts of operating cost because it removes the need for multiple human crews on the stations which operate a 24/7 live presence, operating in shifts. By reducing the human presence due to higher reliability technology, preventative maintenance and predictive analytics, the operator can give targeted interventions ahead of critical failures instead of placing humans offshore in a box to monitor the equipment.
Cut from the Rewind Germany webpage, clearly highlighting how a legacy wind farm asset can be brought back to a high yield of energy with careful layout and selection of equipment. Credit: re-wind.de
Support Staff/ Traditional Careers
It is worth mentioning that even with the above, the Wind sector will experience the incumbent trend of offshoring of works, automation of rote activities (as it has always been with office work), there will still be opportunities for 'support' functions such as finance, accounting, IT. This is a critical one to ensure that connectivity and data flows are live and gathering real-time operations data. HR will be a critical function to ensure that new personnel are onboard well for growing wind companies, in addition to giving the assurance for required offshore certifications as mentioned above.
Apprenticeships
More and more, countries and national renewable energy champion companies are touting their increased offer of wind-specific apprenticeships. In our next article, we will cover further this popular and increasingly competitive route for younger people looking to enter the renewable energy transition in a strong starting position.
You can reach me on Twitter @Ronnie_Writes
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