Wind industry calls for more skilled workers
Elaine Brass
23rd October 2009
The wind industry and the skills sector have called on the Government to commit to getting more people into the green industries, in a bid to meet the Government’s 2020 renewable energy targets.
Wind industry representatives and bosses from the skills sector signed an accord at the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) Skills Summit, this week, to encourage a new National Renewable Energy Apprenticeship Programme. They believe such a programme would help bring in the 60,000 skilled workers needed to help meet the renewable targets.
The renewable industry is facing an impending skills shortage, with a falling number of engineering graduates and qualified technicians. The BWEA wants the Government to sign up to the Wind & Renewables Skills Sector Accord to reverse the trend.
Speaking at the summit, which was held during BWEA's 31st annual conference in Liverpool, BWEA chief executive Maria McCaffery said: "The task ahead of our sector is enormous, as are the opportunities if just half the manufacturing for the next generation of offshore wind farms takes place here in the UK then this industry will grow 10-fold from just 6,000 jobs today to 60,000 by 2020. But in order to attract the investment and build that industry we need to have a skilled workforce ready to work in the sector."
A recent report commissioned by the BWEA outlined the demand/supply imbalance faced by the wind industry. It noted the pools of people with the skills and experience to perform many of the roles "are limited". As growth accelerates, it predicted that specialist roles would become particularly difficult to fill. "Industry players currently see this issue as the fourth most significant barrier to growth in the sector, though it is set to increase in importance,” the report stated.
Commenting on the signing of the skills accord, McCaffery said: "If we can get this right, we can create thousands of green collar jobs for the UK, and wind and renewables will power the green economy for a generation to come."
Present at the Skills Summit were NPower Renewables UK boss, Paul Cowling, the UK managing director of Siemens, Christoph Ehlers and the Government's Apprenticeship Ambassador Mark Andrews.
The Government is committed to deliver 15 per cent of energy from renewable sources by 2020.