It’s the perfect green job for adrenaline junkies: climbing the equivalent of 20 storeys up a wind turbine, throwing ropes off the edge and then rappelling down to the blades to repair them, all while dangling high off the ground.
“It’s a lot of fun. I really enjoy it,” said Edan Blomme, who’s been a rope access blade repair technician for 12 years. The job is in high demand, but not many people in North America are trained to do it, he says. “I could work every single day of the year if I wanted to.”
Besides being exhilarating, the work is key to keeping wind turbines generating sustainable power.
Blomme says the turbines need regular maintenance, much as a car does. The fibreglass blades are exposed to extremely strong winds that exert a lot of force on them. They can also be eroded by sand or salt or hit by lightning, causing cracks or unevenness.
“They need constant upkeep,” said Blomme, whose specialty is repairing the blades. He also sometimes inspects, cleans or repaints them. “With upkeep, they’ll work for generations.”
According to Vietnam-based construction company Vivablast, which provides wind energy training courses, “blade repair is very important in the wind turbine industry, especially if the owner wants to maximize productivity for another 10-15 years.”
Blomme is originally from Toronto, but followed a girlfriend to London, England, and eventually got into jobs that involved hanging from buildings to install things like billboards. Then a colleague told him about all the money he was going to make fixing wind turbines in warm, sunny Thailand.
“And this was a rainy, cold morning in London,” Blomme said. “I thought, well, that’s perfect.”
He signed up for a three-week blade repair course in Denmark. He never made it to Thailand, but he did jobs in the U.K., including an offshore wind farm — it “was really cool … taking a boat to work every day.” He also did jobs in Sweden and then in the U.S., where his British employer was hired because the U.S. had so few wind turbine repair technicians of its own.
In fact, he saw that in Texas many turbines just weren’t maintained or repaired at all.
“You’d see fields of rotting wind farms,” he said. “I thought, well, this is not sustainable.”
Most recently, he’s been working in Alberta. In August, the provincial government announced that the Alberta Utilities Commission was pausing all approvals for new renewable power projects for nearly seven months. It cited concerns over the impacts of wind and solar on agricultural, recreational and Crown lands, and said it is deciding whether developers should pay a security deposit to account for future site cleanup costs.
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