This guy climbs wind turbines to keep them spinning

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This week:

• This guy climbs wind turbines to keep them spinning
• Rain as a potential energy source
• An oil exec was on the hot seat. But should the Canadian government be feeling the heat?

This guy climbs wind turbines to keep them spinning

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.

Blomme said while he thinks the motivation for the pause is political, and he’s not sure it was necessary, there “does need to be a far, far longer-term plan for everything.”

One aspect of that is making sure there is a workforce that can keep wind installations running for years to come — something Blomme is hoping to help with. He’s starting a group to help train, mentor and advocate for renewable energy workers in Alberta. He has also teamed up with Advance Blade Repair Services, which has schools in the U.K., Singapore and Dallas, and aims to open Canada’s first dedicated blade repair school in Calgary.

— Emily Chung

Old issues of What on Earth? are here. The CBC News climate page is here.

Check out our radio show and podcast. This week: from appliances to smartphones, can the “right to repair” your stuff cut greenhouse gas emissions? Also: finding common ground through climate collaboration in the Middle East. What On Earth airs on Sundays at 11 a.m. ET, 11:30 a.m. in Newfoundland and Labrador. Subscribe on your favourite podcast app or hear it on demand at CBC Listen.

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Reader feedback

Responding to the article on Eddie Dearden’s push to change “natural gas” to “fossil gas,”Kate Walker wrote:

“We have been using ‘fracked gas’ here in B.C., which reminds people how much of our precious water resources the LNG [liquified natural gas] industry wastes.”

Peter Romkey:

“Great article and semantics are incredibly significant. That’s why industry, Canadian governments and academia openly accepted the change from tar sands to oilsands!”

Elumalai Ponnusami said he endorses Dearden’s campaign:

“As [a] chemical engineer, he is able to feel the psyche of people to misunderstand [the meaning of the] label natural gas. It is funny in language that an undressed chicken literally is called, utility-wise, ‘dressed chicken.’ I thank Mr. E. Dearden for his activism.”

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The Big Picture: Harnessing rain power

The urgent need to move away from fossil fuels has led to ever-increasing awareness of alternative energy sources, from solar to wind to tidal and beyond. One source that has received little notice is rain.

Collecting raindrop energy requires something called a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG), a technology that is also used to capture energy from ocean waves. A recent paper outlines how TENG panels could be modelled after solar panel arrays to make harvesting raindrop energy more efficient.

Granted, capturing the kinetic energy of falling raindrops is not going to rival large-scale power sources like hydro or nuclear in terms of helping meet our demand. While they travel a great distance, droplets don’t accelerate much on their way down, hitting a terminal velocity within a few seconds. But researchers say this power source could still be useful for low-wattage items, like implantable medical devices and applications in the Internet of Things (web-enabled appliances).

Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around the web

• There are claims online that EVs are worse for the environment and more prone to safety issues than fossil fuel-burning vehicles. Are any of them true? (Hint: No.) Carbon Brief fact-checks 21 of the most common myths about EVs.

• A researcher at the Kiel Institute for World Economy was fired for refusing to fly home to Germany from Papua New Guinea. He wanted to use slower, lower carbon transport, and explains why he stood his ground at the expense of his job.

• While the researcher was fired, more and more employees are quitting when their values on climate don’t align with those of their employers.

• You’ve heard of heat pumps to heat your home, but what about heat pumps to heat the water for your bath? CleanTechnica shares some personal experiences with heat pump water heaters and their benefits.

An oil exec was on the hot seat. But should the Canadian government be feeling the heat?

On Parliament Hill last week, MPs grilled Rich Kruger, the CEO of Suncor, over comments he made on an investor call this summer.

He had told shareholders that the Calgary-based energy giant wastoo focused on the energy transition and had to get back to its fundamental business — the oilsands.

Kruger told the House of Commonsstanding committee on natural resources his comments were misinterpreted and that his focus is ensuring the company is making profits now to be able to afford the required investments in decarbonization.

“It’s good for business, and it’s the right thing to do,” said Kruger, a former executive at Imperial Oil and ExxonMobil. “When those things can overlap, we are sufficiently incentivized to spend money to research and to pursue new business opportunities.”

But in many cases across the industry, that hasn’t happened. After pledging in recent years to cut back on production and emissions and focus on renewables, oil and gas companies have in recent monthswalked those commitments back — despiteseeing record profits.

Catherine Abreu, founder of Canadian non-profit Destination Zero, which works with climate groups across the country, said last week’s hearing revealed less about Suncor’s profit motive than about the federal government’s failures.

“We should not be surprised that the CEO of a publicly traded company is primarily interested in returning profits to his shareholders,” Abreu said. “In order to meet our climate goals, we need to be seeing the hand of government step in.”

The president of Shell Canada, Susannah Pierce, made the point recently that oil companies can only decarbonize as fast as the rest of the economy.

“[If you are] a company that is servicing its customers that are still demanding a fossil fuel energy source, it’s very difficult to then not provide your customers with that energy they demand,”she said.

In the United States, domestic oil production just hit an all-time high, and Canada couldlead the world in oil production growth in 2024. There has also been a wave of high-profile mergers and acquisitions in both the United States and Canada, in what experts say is a sign of an industry flush with cash and increasingly confident in the short- and medium-term outlook.

After his company acquired Pioneer Natural Resources for almost $60 billion US, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woodstold CNBC oil “will be around for a long time.”

That prognosis is at odds with a much-discussed report released last month bythe International Energy Agency, which predicted oil and gas production would peak by the end of the decade. According to the IEA, investments in renewables could reach $1.8 trillion this year, with solar investments set to eclipse oil investments for the first time.

The report warned, though, that a failure to sufficiently ramp up renewables between now and 2030 would create “additional climate risks.”

It would make achieving the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warning to 1.5 C difficult and largely dependent on carbon removal technologies, which are expensive and unproven at the scale required.

That challenge underscores the importance of the COP28 climate summit that begins next month in Dubai, where world leaders will try to reach an agreement on the way forward to reduce global emissions.

Warren Mabee, a Queen’s University professor and director of the school’s Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy, said the oil boom will eventually come to an end — sooner rather than later — as economies turn toward renewable energy sources.

“Executives and company leaders, I think that they must be aware that this is coming,” he said. “The big question is, are they prepared to do what needs to be done? Or are they just hoping that when the day does come that governments will just bail them out?”

The oil and gas sector accounts for more than one-quarter of Canada’s total emissions, and experts say Canada won’t meet the country’s 2030 target without a substantial decline in carbon emissions from pumping oil and gas out of the ground.

Katya Rhodes, an assistant professor at the University of Victoria’s school of public administration, said Canada’s oil and gas emissions won’t decline until there is “a stringent and compulsory climate policy in place.”

This would require putting in place a cap on oil and gas emissions, beyond the carbon pricing system and clean fuel regulations, she said in an email exchange.

Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said again this week that a cap will be put forward this fall (although it could take another year to go into effect), and that the coming policy won’t be affected by a recent Supreme Court of Canada decision that found parts of the federal environmental assessment legislation were unconstitutional.

Abreu said the government also needs to introduce details of its more stringent methane regulations and green taxonomy plan, which will serve as a framework for sustainable investing, to lead “an orderly transition out of the oil and gas sector.”

“We are in a place globally right now where we can no longer afford for every producing country to be vying to produce the last barrel of oil and the last unit of gas that gets sold on the market,” she said.

— Benjamin Shingler

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