Other employers in the area make similar asks, though a handful require just a high school diploma.

To work as an entry-level wind technician, the company asks for a one-year college or technical school certificate, or else a similar amount of experience in wind-power or other related training programs, or some combination of the two. Pattern, a spokesperson told me, will “prioritize local vendors, suppliers and workforce,” and is building out its own GWO - short for Global Wind Organisation training, which has become an industry standard certification for working at heights - with training partners for SunZia, which promises more than 100 full-time jobs. Regardless of how the actual numbers shake out (many technicians travel between sites, almost everyone who I spoke with for this story told me), they raise a thorny question: How can the nascent wind industry nearly double the size of its workforce in a matter of years - especially where the industry is already strong?Īll of these wind farms, of course, will need technicians, along with managers and operations and maintenance personnel. will need nearly 10,000 new wind technicians, a fair chunk of whom will be living, spending, and paying taxes in New Mexico and Texas. ( Other estimates range from 0.1-10.8 permanent jobs per megawatt.)īy that math, just for the buildout of onshore wind spurred by the IRA - and leaving aside the 30 GW of offshore wind that the Biden administration has pledged to build by 2030 - the U.S.

In 2022, 11,200 Americans worked as wind technicians, with just under half of them in Texas, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, servicing a total of 144 GW of capacity (including a negligible amount of offshore wind) - about 0.08 jobs per megawatt. There’s no comprehensive estimate of how many wind technicians will be necessary to serve America’s wind farms by 2030, but we can make some educated guesses. According to data from Revelio Labs, a workforce tracking company, more than 20% of wind jobs created in the past year were in Texas. While the bulk of jobs created by wind farms come during their construction, turbines still require long-term maintenance and operation - “Jiffy Lube 300 feet in the air,” Andy Swapp, a faculty member at Mesalands Community College’s Wind Energy Technology program in Tucumcarie, New Mexico, called it. Texas and New Mexico have, respectively, the most and third-most potential wind capacity in the country.

Once it’s completed, the project will make the state a national leader in installed capacity. And while neighboring New Mexico has fewer turbines, it was one of the country’s leading installers of utility-scale wind in 2021 last month, Pattern Energy announced it had closed financing on SunZia, a long-awaited 3.5 GW wind farm about three hours northwest of the Permian Basin’s New Mexico portion. It’s Texas, however, that produces more wind power than any other state in the country. Wind potential is everywhere in the U.S., off the coasts and in the Mountain West especially, and the Inflation Reduction Act is expected to catalyze 127 gigawatts of onshore wind by 2030, some of which has already been built. If one were to go looking for a Permian Basin of wind - a wind energy superregion waiting to be born - the actual Permian Basin wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

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