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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/business/scotland-wind-farms-offshore.html>
"The pilot of the nearly 80-foot work boat gunned its powerful engines, pinning
the bow against the base of a towering wind turbine in the smooth North Sea.
Three men in yellow and orange outfits stepped onto metal rungs and started
slowly scaling the nearly 300-foot structure, past the huge blades that help
send electricity to Scotland.
It was a regular workday for these employees and contractors of a Scottish
utility, SSE, and its partners, which operate the vast Beatrice wind farm off
the northern tip of Great Britain.
Their job is to go from turbine to turbine — Beatrice has 84 arrayed over 50
square miles of blue water — performing maintenance of the powerful machines.
Teams can usually service two or three in a day.
It’s grueling work — up to 12 hours a day on the water — but it has its
rewards. David Larter, one of the men who climbed the tower, showed a video he
had made on his phone while eating lunch one day from a perch high above the
North Sea: a minke whale, gently rolling through the water below the tower. “We
were quite lucky that day,” he said.
Like other people around Wick, a former fishing port where the wind farm’s
operations are based, Mr. Larter also considers himself fortunate to have
signed onto a business that is growing as Europe seeks to replace oil and gas,
whose production has been a mainstay of this part of Scotland, with cleaner
energy.
“This industry is the future, isn’t it,” he said."
Via
The Fixer November 30, 2022:
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/in-this-french-village-people-with-alzheimers-are-encouraged-to-roam/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics