A hydraulic repair technician at Wind Turbine Tools in Lincoln, is responsible for making sure that the bolt tensioners and hydraulic pumps returned to the facility are tested for reliability before being sent back to the field. The multimillion-dollar Lincoln business is growing in spite of the global recession.
Cell phone coverage only recently came to this rural mountain community bordering some of Montana’s most famous wilderness areas.
The nearest airport is 62 miles away, and the anchor employers are a beef jerky plant and the U.S. Forest Service.
On a morning when everyone is home and tucked into their beds, 1,181 people live here.
This is a beautiful spot on the globe, but for all its scenic splendor and off-the-beaten-path charm, Lincoln is an unlikely home for an international multimillion-dollar company on the verge of expansion.
Yet, this is exactly where you will find Wind Turbine Tools.
Headquartered in Lincoln, the company is a one-of-a-kind business on the leading edge of the booming world of wind technology.
Their purview? They buy American and European tools and sell them to the wind turbine industry throughout North America.
“What we do is supply tools and service the parts that make wind turbines work,” explained Jim Daugherty, who owns the company with his wife Linda.
“And we are busier than ever.”
Wind Turbine Tools is located in a wood-paneled building on Lincoln’s main drag that looks, inconveniently, like a Forest Service building.
Not a day goes by without several carloads stopping to ask about the famed 830-pound grizzly bear, the third-largest ever recorded in Montana, killed last year near Lincoln and stuffed for public display at the ranger district office in Lincoln.
That means WTT’s staff has to make time around their daily work – ordering and tracking products from places such as Germany and Denmark, e-mailing and phoning their international clientele, and shipping tools to customers across North America – to give directions to the big bear. (It’s just down the road.)
So, there’s some motivation to dress up WTT’s front lawn with a model wind turbine, said Ken Justus, the company’s chief financial officer. The building, now home to WTT’s state-of-the-art calibration lab and a 6,000-square-foot warehouse, once served as a storefront for a snowmobile dealership.
The irony isn’t lost on the Daughertys.
“It’s gone from an oil-based business to a wind business,” said Jim Daugherty. “I do think it’s a sign of the times – our need to move away from our dependency on oil.”
His business is the result of pure risk – a giant, nerve-wracking, calculated leap 10 years ago into a brand-new industry, Daugherty said.
He was in the right place at the right time, California in the early 1990s, when the wind industry was just taking flight in the United States.
At the time, Daugherty was selling industrial supply tools and got a call from a wind turbine maintenance company in California.
“They were having problems with some American-made tools. Torque wrenches weren’t standing up to the job,” he said. “They had failure and somebody was injured.”
With that information rattling around his head, Daugherty began doing some research.
He discovered European manufacturers like Stahlwille had been making precision wind turbine tools for decades, with tools calibrated to the highest standards and
35 percent lighter than their American counterparts.
A few phone calls later, Daugherty became a supplier of the specialized hard-working tools, and introduced them to the California wind turbine community.
“It was a huge success,” he said. “From that first wrench, we took on the whole line. And then others.”
Word spread throughout the emerging North American wind industry that Jim Daugherty was the tool guy.
“Safety is critically important in this industry,” Daugherty said. “Those blades are the length of a football field and turbine towers are 300 feet tall. Accidents in this business tend to be catastrophic. You don’t want a blade flinging off or having maintenance workers fall or get electrocuted.
“Light, smart tools that get the job done safely are essential, particularly for guys who are climbing a 300-foot tall tower.”
The business was changing in other ways, too. It moved to Lincoln in 2005 because of Linda Daugherty’s love for her home state and the need to be closer to her family in Missoula and Conrad.
The transition from Temecula, Calif., to Lincoln wasn’t all that difficult, Jim Daugherty said.
“Really, all we need is access to an airport, and we are about an hour from Great Falls, Missoula and Helena, so I have some choices,” he said. “And people who want to work.”
“One of the nice things about Lincoln is that it has a stable work force,” Linda Daugherty said, “and because so many jobs around here are seasonal, there are a lot of people who want the opportunity of a year-round job.”
Their small staff of six has grown to 31. Thanks to President Barack Obama’s alternative energy initiatives, they are already experiencing an increased demand for their services, and therefore, expect more growth in the future.
That growth stems from those early years in the tool trade, which helped forge important connections with leaders in the wind industry and with tool manufacturers in Europe, some of which have evolved into exclusive relationships.
As business expanded, Jim Daugherty filled another niche in the market.
European tools, considered the Cadillacs of the industry, must be recalibrated and regularly tested to ensure they are up to the prescribed work. Thus, Wind Turbine Tools’ calibration business, the servicing of the tools.
The work sounds rather mundane, Daugherty said, but consider the demands of the high-tech $6,000 tensioner pump he imports from a company in the United Kingdom.
It is responsible for screwing nuts onto the 33-foot-long bolts that are drilled into the ground to hold down a wind turbine’s foundation. Its specialty is stretching the giant bolts at a very precise pressure, measured at 22,750 pounds per square inch, so there is no play in the bolt that could cause the tower to tumble. As the tensioner pump stretches the bolt, it simultaneously puts the nut in place.
Each tower has a double ring of 200 bolts that need this work, Daugherty explained, and every nut and bolt is critical to securing the tower’s foundation.
“There’s no question this is dangerous work if tools fail or if they are used improperly,” Daugherty said, “particularly with the torque tools because of the tremendous pressure they are working at.”
“But the biggest challenge right now isn’t selling the equipment or finding a demand for it, it’s the lack of qualified people,” he said. “Quality technicians are hard to find that are trained properly.
“The good news is that I think there are several universities that are coming up with training programs.”
These are exciting, heady days, Daugherty said. The jobs of which he speaks – calibration experts and maintenance workers – are part of the little-known world of manpower behind the wind power industry. That’s the segment of industry Gov. Brian Schweitzer hopes will employ Montanans, said Greg Kegel, dean of the College of Technical Sciences at Montana State University-Northern.
Having recently landed a $1.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor, MSU is well positioned to fill the void and get Montanans trained for the high-paying work that has an annual base salary of around $45,000.
The school has several courses already up and running, and at the end of the month will have its first major planning meeting to discuss creation of a wind technician program.
It only makes sense, Kegel said. Just look at the latest industry statistics.
In 2008, the United States passed Germany to become the world leader in wind power installations, according to the American Wind Energy Association. Some
$47.5 billion was spent on the installation of that equipment, and more projects are in the pipeline.
In the U.S., the massive growth has meant creation of 35,000 new jobs in the wind energy market, bringing the total number of jobs to 85,000 in 2008.
“Right now, Montana ranks fifth in potential for wind power capacity,” Kegel said. “We have more wind turbines going in – 75 towers were just put in the Ethridge area near Shelby, 75 more are expected to go in this spring and there will be another 250 towers put in by Cut Bank.”
“All of this is very promising and I know there are more projects in the works,” he said. “It really looks like there is a growing need for trained people in this field and we are going to prepare for that.”
Wind Turbine Tools has stepped forward as a willing partner, and that is crucial to the program’s success, Kegel said.
“They bring all of their partnerships and linkages here, they are working with us to develop the curriculum and get our hands on the needed equipment,” he said. “It’s an ideal industry-university collaboration.
“We are really excited about this. It means jobs in a very clean business, the kind of business we would like to develop in this state.”
Recently, after dropping off a party of international business executives at the Missoula airport, Justus, the company’s chief financial officer, said the wind industry amazes him daily.
Recruited by the Daughertys to step away from his high-profile position at a Missoula bank, Justus uses the words “stunning,” “surprising” and “amazing” to describe his new career field.
Sometimes, he said, it’s moving so fast it’s downright overwhelming.
“It just incredible to witness the rapid growth in this industry, to see Jim and Linda Daugherty take their mom-and-pop business and grow it into a multimillion (dollar) company in just the past few years,” Justus said. “And that they chose to do it out of Lincoln.”
“The challenge isn’t being in a remote place,” he said. “It’s juggling the growth with multiple companies to get the products, and those companies are in different countries, with different time zones and trade in different currency.
“It’s everything really. Everything down to translations for instructions on how to use a pump to setting up meetings with people who are around the country and the world.”
“It’s an awesome challenge,” Justus said. “No matter where you are.”
By Betsy Cohencan, The Missoulian – http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2009/02/22/news/top/news01.txt
Northwest Renewable News 