Wind school -- Columbia Gorge program beginning to catch air

THE DALLES, Ore. -- Jeremy Toole huddles over a circuit board in a crowded electronics laboratory at Columbia Gorge Community College, plugging wires in a variety of patterns and connections to amplify sound through cheap, quarter-sized speakers.

The 33-year-old married father of two is working on a new career, weary of his commission-dependent, financial roller-coaster job in organic and gourmet grocery sales.

He's aiming high, at least 200 feet in the air, where the wind turbines so common on both sides of the Columbia River are perched.

Toole and other students in the college's renewable energy technology program are among the first generation of locally trained workers in the Northwest's rapidly growing field.

"Ten to 15 years from now, we're going to be the experts," he said, gesturing to his classroom full of second-year students.

The turbines sprouting across Eastern Washington and Oregon will need more than 700 trained technicians over the next five to 10 years, according to a December report published by Columbia Gorge Community College, the Yakima-based South Central Washington Workforce Council and industry consultants. Those jobs pay an average starting wage of $19.50 per hour, the report said.

Community colleges in Washington state only recently started building programs to fill those jobs. Oregon is about three years ahead of the curve.

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Columbia Gorge's renewable energy technology program traces its infancy in the 1990s with electronics courses for workers in the hydropower industry. It then shifted to training technicians for the computer chip manufacturing industry.

That waned in the early 2000s and the college closed its electronics program.

Then, college officials noticed the turbines shooting up out of the surrounding wheat fields and cattle ranches and asked wind farm managers if they might need trained workers. The answer was yes, said Suzanne Burd, a program planner for Columbia Gorge Community College.

The college's veteran electronics instructor, Tom Lieurance, spent a summer shadowing wind farm workers before writing the curriculum, while administrators sought grants for equipment.

The renewable energy technology program accepted its first students in 2007.

It's designed to create well-rounded industrial electronics technicians who can work in a variety generation fields, said Lieurance, now the program's leading faculty member.

"I don't want them to be surprised by anything they see out there," Lieurance said.

The school has a salvaged turbine -- on the ground, that is -- in a shop overlooking campus, and a decommissioned blade greets visitors as they pull into the parking lot. The college also offers a variety of laboratory equipment for hands-on practice.

The program's one-year certificate classes are maxed out at 80 students per year, and already have a waiting list. In June, 18 students will graduate with two-year associate degrees.

The college has no job placement office, but unofficial counts show some success, Burd said. About half the anticipated June graduates have been interviewed by wind farm companies. About 80 percent of those have been offered jobs.

Some students don't even make it that far. Wind farms have been known to hire students mid-course.

Second-year student Erick Lujano, 20, already works as a paid intern for Vestas, a Danish company that manufactures wind turbines and manages many of the region's farms. He lives with his family in Hood River, Ore., and plans to pursue a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at the Oregon Institute of Technology, all while working in the industry.

The community college's training requires one test specific to the wind industry -- the climb.

Wind technicians must be able to scale ladders at least 200 feet high to fix turbines. Columbia Gorge students are tested on that during field trips to area farms, supervised by company safety officers.

"They want to see if we can hack the climb," said Jared Langdon, a 19-year-old student from White Salmon.

Langdon passed his test in December.

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Just this year, Walla Walla Community College opened its wind turbine technician technology program. It has 16 first-year students who are learning general electronics.

The college, meanwhile, is drafting lesson plans for year two. It does not have laboratory equipment yet, said Mindy Stevens, the college's vice president of instruction for workforce education.

To prevent a glut of wind farm training programs, the state designated Walla Walla as the lead community college for wind technology. Three others are partners for distance learning.

That's where Yakima comes in. Eventually, students may enroll in the wind farm program through distance learning at Yakima Valley Community College, Wenatchee Valley Community College and Columbia Basin College in Pasco.

Community colleges can't afford all this individually. It may cost Walla Walla more than $1 million to get the program fully running, Stevens said. The college is seeking grants from wind farm companies and elsewhere to pay for instructors and equipment.

Steering the growth is the Center of Excellence for Energy Production, a consortium of colleges and industry leaders based at Centralia College. The group just last week finished publishing standards for wind technology education.

"This is brand new," said Barbara Hins-Turner, executive director.

The next step is to find a central laboratory for students so they can work on machinery and equipment specific to wind power, such as a turbine, Hins-Turner said.

Meanwhile, a private school has opened. The Northwest Renewable Energy Institute in Vancouver, Wash., opened its doors to new students last summer. It offers a six-month training program worth 54 credits, according to its Web site.

Wind turbine companies have been hiring from the ranks of farm kids, mechanics, former utility company workers and retired military personnel -- anyone handy with a wrench -- led by a few experienced managers brought in from elsewhere, said Paul Woodin, executive director of the Community Renewable Energy Association, based in The Dalles.

Vestas has its own training facility in Portland, site of its United States headquarters, for example.

However, growth across the U.S. has been so fast, "those experienced people are pretty well depleted now," Woodin said. And many aspiring wind technicians want a college degree, too.

The former project director for some of Eastern Oregon's first wind farms, he consulted for the programs at Columbia Gorge and Walla Walla community colleges.

Woodin also foresees a growing demand for electrical workers in other fields, including hydropower dams, utility companies and solar generators, as new technologies develop and older workers retire.

"I told my son that, in the Northwest right now, it's the best employment opportunity I see in the rural areas," Woodin said.

His advice might have his son, John, convinced to leave his fishing career in Alaska and try his hand at catching the wind.

* Ross Courtney can be reached at 509-930-8798 or rcourtney@yakimaherald.com.