 
A Day on the Job: Wiring
Iowa’s Green Skyscrapers
January 2008, Electrical Worker
 On any given day in rural northern Iowa, teams of inside wiremen drive to remote and blustery cornfields, take to a lonely ladder inside the tallest structures in miles and start climbing. And climbing and climbing.
When they descend from their perches atop the 300-foot industrial turbines, the modern day windmills are set to start spinning to collect their 1.5-megawatts, wired to the grid by the outside linemen working on the ground.
It is not a typical workplace for the inside electricians, but wind and other renewable sources are becoming increasingly important work for the construction branch, said IBEW Construction and Maintenance Department Director Jerry Westerholm. “There is definitely a momentum on Capitol Hill for green technologies,” Westerholm said.
“It’s an astronomic amount of work,” said Des Moines, Iowa, Local 347 Business Manager Gerry Granberg, who has been on the front lines of the wind turbine’s transition from an oddity on America’s landscape to another day at the office for thousands of IBEW members.
“Henkels and McCoy is bidding on wind projects in Texas and Canada and all over the United States,” said General Foreman Michael Brummitt, a Decatur, Ill., Local 146 member, who along with approximately 40 wiremen from Des Moines and travelers from across the country, helped finish the Pomeroy Wind Farm in early December. “These are being bid and built everywhere.”
Brummitt’s crews performed top to bottom electrical wiring for the windmills, from the control wiring at the hub of the turbine to the transformer at the bottom, lugging cable and making connections throughout. Massive structures, each GE 1.5 megawatt model like those at the Pomeroy project, weighs a total of 164 tons.
In a day that ranges from six to 12 hours, each electrician has a specific task at different points on the tower. Usually only one has to make the climb all the way to the top of the steel structure, which is anchored on platforms of more than 1,000 tons of cement and steel rebar. The others are stationed at various stages, tying together heavy diesel locomotive cables for electricity and fiber optic cable for communications.
“It’s not really technical, it’s just what we do as wiremen,” Brummitt said.
The wiremen work with a ladder and cable system, climbing a straight ladder with a cable attached to a front harness. In all, the job of hooking up a windmill takes about a day and a half, Brummitt said. Safety is a priority and Brummitt said in two years of wind installation, he has never had an accident or even a close call.
Before the inside wiring can start, outside linemen do the underground and substation work.
For the Pomeroy project, around 40 outside members laid in approximately 60 miles of trench line, equaling 180 miles of 35-kilovolt cable to hook up the towers to the grid. They completed 160 high voltage underground cable splices and 950 high voltage cable terminations. They installed the underground collection system, the tie-in at the substations and connected transformers at each of the 132 towers to the system. They also oversaw the high voltage cable tests and energized the wind farm.
The work is good and steady, albeit unexciting in the rural Midwest, said General Foreman Doug Roche, Toronto Local 353. “It’s flat and 90 percent corn,” he said. “That’s it.”
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