Wind Farm Operator Career
Wind Farm Operator Career
The Real Poop
Do you have the mindset of an electrician, but also want to help the environment? Go with the wind.
No, not Gone with the Wind. Go with the wind, as in get a job at a wind farm. Sound interesting? Wind farms are those fields of gigantic three-blade windmills you pass on the highway during the most boring part of the family road trip. They require technicians to keep those windmills all working properly, and that's where you come in.
The average wind turbine technician makes $45,970 per year, or around twenty-two bucks an hour (source). So you're probably not in this job for the money. You're probably very into science and you probably like figuring out how things work. You should also do your best to not be afraid of heights.
The basic ideas behind the wind turbines haven't changed in thousands of years, making them either an impressive testament to simple mechanics or a stale model begging for innovation.
A wind turbine is based around a tower hundreds of feet tall that supports the "nacelle." Inside the nacelle is a gearbox and a generator. Oh, and then there are the giant blades more than 100 feet long that create uneven air pressure differentials—just like an airplane wing. Because they're even longer than your dad's hair in the seventies, the blades move at about eighteen revolutions per minute.
Eighteen revolutions per minute might not sound very fast. That's where the gearbox comes in. A wind turbine generates most of its power through its rotor shaft, which spins gears that move at speeds closer to 1800 rpm (source). Altogether, these on-shore turbines use up around an acre of land and can power more than 500 homes (source).
So, do these wind farms actually make money? Not much of it. At least not enough without government subsidies to hold their pants up. You're probably thinking, "Hey, wind is free, isn't it?" Yes, but no place has wind twenty-four hours every day of every year. And only a few places even have the necessary levels of wind.
In order to provide "baseload" power—power available all the time—wind electricity needs to be stored and transmitted. These are not cheap processes. We also need to keep traditional power plants running, just in case (source).
That said, lowered installation costs and subsidies are bringing down the cost per megawatt hour (source). And governments are interested—there's been more than $100 billion invested in new U.S. wind power projects since 2008 (source).
Despite the investments that have been made on behalf of wind power, there are still many issues to sort out in getting the wind from the turbines to the people who need the energy. The windiest parts of the world aren't where the majority of people live (go figure), so you need a transmission line to get the power from the remote fields of, say, rural Texas, out to market, e.g. the hundreds of thousands of people living in Austin.
If the transmission line system sounds costly and inefficient to you, give yourself a gold star. It is. New transmission lines, which often cross state lines, get stalled all the time by uncooperative state governments and by the landowners who will lose their homes to the project (source). If you're building off-shore, like "Cape Wind" in Cape Cod or a recently approved project in Yorkshire, you'll need a submarine cable.
This is all to say that while wind energy is a burgeoning new industry, there are still enough kinks in the system that there isn't a whole lot of cash to spare.