Iowa Lakes Community College runs a Wind Energy Operations and Maintenance (O+M) training program already recognized as the best in the country and it may very well be the best in the world.
Last week we caught up with the unassuming retired Marine behind this program, Al Zeitz, and got the inside story on how ILCC came to be the only wind energy program in the country operating their own full sized turbine.
Iowa Lakes Community College was involved in the selection of a large scale wind turbine during the spring of 2004. They'd retained the very luckily named Tom Wind, an Iowa based wind energy consultant, to help in the system selection and they began casting around the area looking for people familiar with the technology who could maintain the system. They had no designs on teaching wind turbine O+M at the time, initially being interested only in cost savings, but that changed ...
Enter Alden "Al" Zeitz. Mr.Zeitz spent nine years in the Marine Corp working on aircraft ordinance systems and when he exited the Corp he attended the now defunct wind energy program at Southwest Minnesota Technical in Jackson, Minnesota. Defunct? Yes, because that school thought there was a lack of interest.
Mr. Zeitz relates that at the time he was "being drug through" the Storm Lake II wind energy project, a 107 turbine expansion to the existing 145 units in the Storm Lake I system. Enron had been involved. We will now close a curtain of charity over this unfortunate episode.
Based on his expertise in managing a team maintaining what is now General Electric's massive 252 turbine installation south of Storm Lake, Iowa, Zeitz was invited to participate in the discussions surrounding the installation of the wind turbine near Iowa Lakes' campus. He enthusiastically agreed to help.
During the planning process the president of the school, Dr. Harold Prior, asked Zeitz about the supply of qualified technicians in the area and learned that they simply didn't exist and that people were being selected for aptitude and trained on the job. The good doctor knew an opportunity when he saw one, and promptly pursued it.
A plan was made including a market analysis, this got shipped off to the State of Iowa for approval and they came back with budget money sufficient for one instructor. Several interviewed for the position but Mr. Zeitz received the offer and began work on the first of July.
The first class of fifteen would enter the program at the beginning of September, just sixty short days after Mr. Zeitz began his work. Did we mention there weren't any books on these subjects? Marine discipline and determination kicked in, a one man manual writing boot camp was created, and while the ink might have been still drying when the students were picking up their books the program was complete.
Despite the compressed time frame for startup the 2004 class progressed nicely, with nine of the fifteen original students going on to complete and receive jobs in the industry. Nineteen of the twenty nine who began the program in 2005 graduated in 2007 and promptly received jobs. The 2006 group will be graduating in a few months and Zeitz estimates that nineteen of the original thirty will graduate.
When asked about the high attrition rate Mr. Zeitz returned a two word explanation: "academic rigor". The first week of class students climb to the eighty meter high nacelle of the school's Vestas V-82 wind turbine. There are typically one or two who either discover a fear of heights or decide they lack the physical stamina for the job. More than half of the students are adults returning to school for a new career. The remainder who fail to finish are done in by the eighty credit hour multidisciplinary program Zeitz built and has tuned for the last four years.
Students wishing to graduate must be well grounded in the mechanical, electrical, and hydraulic systems in the wind turbines, which at the multimegawatt scale are basically strange, earthbound aircraft in terms of their technology and complexity. The program doesn't skimp on theory, with turbine site selection, meteorology, and programmable logic controllers getting a thorough exposition. Zeitz hopes to add classes on practical metallurgy, computers, and communications which should serve to further solidify the school's number one position in the industry.
The winter 2008 quarter marks the first classes being taught in the wind energy program's new $1.7 million instruction facility, now populated by Zeitz, another instructor hired in 2005, and two additional instructors added in 2006. The building can easily handle ninety six students, the 2008 cohort will include forty eight, and when the 2009 group begins the program will be operating at capacity.
The class sizes are set to multiples of sixteen. Some labs have eight pieces of equipment which the students use in pairs while others have sixteen total stations. This is done to ensure the instructor has adequate time with each student. Class sizes of twenty were attempted but the instructors struggled to cover all students' questions. Lectures are a maximum of twenty four and this works nicely with the count of instructors and the number of classrooms while maintaining good student participation.
The future is even brighter for the program. The damaged blades beside the new building, donated by the Storm Lake II project, have been joined by a Vestas V-90 prototype nacelle donated by Vestas and a damaged Gamesa 3.0MW nacelle provided by Babcock & Brown after it was dropped during installation. Neither nacelle is a complete system but this does not trouble Mr. Zeitz; they'd have just taken them apart anyway. The next step will be enclosing the area where this equipment is stored with a four season building. As they're teaching blade repair anyway there is some potential that they will do a joint project with a turbine vendor so they can share the work space. There are over four hundred turbines operating within a ninety mile radius of the school and blade damage is a common problem.
The graduates of this internationally recognized program are hotly pursued by an industry willing to pay a twenty year old fresh out of school as much as $35,000 plus benefits. We are told the Danish Vestas program managers fight amongst themselves over the graduates, Irish B9 O&M has six of the program's twenty eight graduates, and Irish Omagh College has sent a delegation to study the program in an attempt to duplicate the efforts.
These photographs give some sense of the scale of today's large wind turbines. The first is the school's 1.65 megawatt Vestas V-82. The nacelle is roughly the size of a Fedex truck. The second is a pair of blades bound for an installation in Minnesota with a Nissan Versa included in the shot for scale.