W I N D T U R B I N E S E R V I C E S T E C H N I C I A N COOL STEM CAREERS CHAPTER ONE WONDERFUL WIND 4 CHAPTER TWO GETTING THE JOB 12 CHAPTER THREE DAY TO DAY 18 CHAPTER FOUR BLOWING INTO THE FUTURE 24 SOME WELL-KNOWN PEOPLE IN WIND TECHNOLOGY 29 GLOSSARY 30 FOR MORE INFORMATION 31 INDEX 32 ABOUT THE AUTHOR 32 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Some wind farms have hundreds of turbines COOL STEM CAREERS WIND TURBINE SERVICES TECHNICIAN 2 1 S T C E N T U R Y S K I L L S L I B R A R Y CHAPTER ONE WONDERFUL WIND In the dead of night the cell phone on Josh’s nightstand lights up and begins to ring He throws the covers back and grabs it instantly awake He’s all but certain who it is and he’s
right It’s the manager of the energy company he works for calling to tell him one of the turbines has begun to malfunction Josh is one of their best wind turbine services technicians so he gets most of the emergency calls He jumps out of bed pulls some clothes on and heads to his truck All the tools he’ll need are already in there It takes him about an hour to reach the wind farm which was built in an open field in the middle of nowhere There are 20 turbines altogether standing in a neat row Each turbine looks like a giant pinwheel spinning in a slow almost lazy way The fifth unit from the left is the one with the problem Josh parks next to it His partner Sarah has already arrived They put on their tool belts open the door at the base of the turbine’s tower and check their harnesses and safety equipment After making sure that they’ll be safe when they reach the top of the tower Josh and Sarah step into the eleva tor As it goes up Josh thinks again about how nice it is to have elevators in these turbines At his last job there were no elevators just ladder steps attached to the tower’s inside wall It took about 20 minutes to climb them and he was always exhausted afterward He and his partner reach the top and step out aware that those lazily spinning blades are just a few feet away now One wrong move and Josh or Sarah could sustain a very seri ous injury The blades are on a rod called an axis and the
