Powering distant windy shores

By Naomi Conrad

Aurich/Germany - “Everyone working for us has to do a test climb”, the safety engineer tells me, as I gaze in trepidation at the narrow iron rungs disappearing into the gloomy, soaring shaft. Yet despite my safety harness, helmet and boots and those thousands of workers clambering up and down wind turbines on various continents, I am feeling somewhat apprehensive about the prospect of scrambling up those fifty-odd vertical metres. “Sometimes the boys race each other up the ladders”, he continues, helpfully. In just under five minutes they can make it to the top. Apparently.

I, however, am to take my time, stop for breath if I need to, for, I soon realise, climbing up is hard work and my arms ache after only a couple of metres. Yet as I continue my methodical ascent up the shaft, one rung at a time, leaning back into the safety harness over the concrete chasm expanding below, I decide that the only way to keep my panic-stricken vertigo at bay is to continue without a pause, step by horribly narrow step. Some fifteen minutes later we reach the top and clamber into the oval fibreglass pod from where the three huge blades turning lazily in the sunny breeze are controlled.

The engineer turns off the blades and we clamber onto the top of the pod. At this giddying-distance the headquarters and storage buildings of Enercon, one of the world’s leading wind turbine producers, appear like a child’s miniature landscape, with even its own tiny railway line leading to the coast from where the many turbines are shipped across the world. The child is messily spreading its tiny toys across the floor: “Enercon isn’t expanding, it’s exploding”, another safety engineer comments.   

Roughly 13,000 workers have passed the vertigo and security test and gone on to build and service over 16,000 wind turbines in some 30 countries. “Assembling a turbine takes about six to eight weeks”, depending on the local conditions, a worker explains. “In the 1990s when we were building wind farms on some of the tiny islands in Japan, we didn’t have email or internet, we felt like real explorers”, he reminisces. What used to be an adventure has long since become a routine procedure, be it in Brazil, India or Scandinavia.

Wind turbines have been, and are being, built and serviced all over the world, including on many tiny, far-away windy islands that most people would find hard to place on a map. An engineer points to a miniscule dot on the world map on the wall of his office: He has just returned from the Ascension Island, a mere spec in the middle of the Atlantic half-way between Africa and South America, shared by the joint British-American Airfield and BBC Relay Station. The wind farm built by Enercon and henceforth serviced by BBC engineers is going to reduce the need for diesel generators guzzling up expensive imported oil “by some 20 percent or so”.

Other wind-swept, remote islands are forced pay excessive prices for their imported fossil fuels and Enercon is an expert in producing small, robust wind turbines for isolated islands with strong winds. Enercon does not, however, build off-shore wind farms, “we don’t believe offshore facilities are a good idea” the safety engineers explain: building and servicing off-shore is far too dangerous and enough energy can be produced on land.

The Falkland Islands, populated by more sheep and penguins than people, better known for Transatlantic conflicts than alternative energies, have installed several Enercon wind turbines, in addition to three turbines purchased in 2006 which make up the Sand Bay Wind Farm and provide energy for some 85 percent of remote Falklands farms. While in 2007 the tiny islands imported some 271 barrels of oil per day to fuel its diesel generators and with oil prices in volatile fluctuation this dependency proved expensive. With the extension of its wind farm, the government hopes to drop fossil fuel dependency further. The turbines are serviced by the islanders: “Several Falklanders came here to learn how to look after the turbines”, the engineer explains. He smiles, remembering how he took the islanders, whose main town Port Stanley has a population of just over 2,000, to Bremen for them to experience a real city’s nightlife.

Yet energy is once again fuelling Transatlantic tensions: Relations between Britain and Argentina over the windy Falkland Islands, or Islas Malvinas in Spanish, have recently gone from, well, stormy to gale-force. British companies have begun explanatory oil drills in the disputed Falklands basin, said to contain huge oil reserves. Rockhopper, one of the companies undertaking the exploratory oil drills, recently announced that the preliminary drills produced medium crude oils and is likely to be commercially viable at oil prices of 50 dollars per barrel. Argentina is furious and claims that Britain is stealing what should rightly be its oil and potential income.

The company concedes though that further drilling explorations are necessary, and much depends on oil prices and smoothing the stormy Transatlantic waters. It may still take years before any oil is pumped to the surface. Until then the Falklanders will continue to clamber up their wind turbines, which the government hopes will produce some forty percent of the island’s energy by the end of this year, with considerably less trepidation and panic than I did.