Some years ago I was working from the site building at a customer’s utility scale wind farm in rural Iowa. A man came to the door and asked for the Site Manager, by name. He had been told to come talk with the Site Manager about getting a job; as I looked over at him, I noticed he was dressed in work clothes and had worn through the leather toes of his steel-toe boots. This man had shown up hoping for work, not for an interview.
Local jobs, for rural towns. We say the words, but I remember what it means each time I visit a wind farm. When I was new in in the renewables industry, I argued for centralizing our supply of fork-lifts. Surely we could cuts costs, leverage our negotiating power and gain efficiencies by making one umbrella agreement for all of our farms with one vendor. For all of my planning, a coworker stopped me by mentioning that he thought we were trying to support local businesses in these small towns by using local equipment, even if it wasn’t always quite as cheap. I agreed with him. We need local jobs, in rural towns.
We can keep more men at home in these small towns, with continued energy innovations. I’ve talked with some of our employees that came over from the fossil-fuel sector. They’ve told me they made a lot more money when working on off-shore oil rigs, or when working on drilling platforms overseas. But they want to be near their families. They want to go back to the small towns they came from. They’re proud of using local resources for their energy needs. Local jobs, for rural people.