He stood on the ground inside the hollow steel stalk of a wind turbine.
Until that day in 2019, Lammi, 46, had worked for a decade as a machinist, fixing the equipment that converts burning coal into electricity.
The strategy: When a coal plant closes, offer the machinists and operators the same job at one of the dwindling number of coal plants that are still running.
Utilities shed almost 7,700 jobs in coal generation in 2019, or 16%, leaving them with just over 38,000 positions, according to the U.S.
Lammi’s route into coal is a typical one.
Then he heard that jobs were available at Consumers Energy, an electric and gas utility that serves much of the state’s Lower Peninsula.
He started as a laborer, doing whatever the machinists or millwrights asked him to do, and then trained to become a machinist himself.
He was everywhere: outside in the frigid winter repairing the ash and water pipelines, or inside the boiler where temperatures reached 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
Karn Generating Complex on the other side of the peninsula, close in 2023, the coal job roll will drop again to 375.
has shuttered 11 coal generators in the last 15 years, with the remaining four in the state slated to close between 2023 and 2030, said Xcel spokesperson Matt Lindstrom.
But those plants will go offline in rapid fire: River Rouge later this year and Trenton Channel and St.
“It’s not like you decided to close a Walgreens and everyone’s out of a job,” said Randazzo, the workforce expert.
The mammoth Navajo Generating Station in Arizona featured both a coal mine and a massive, 2,250-megawatt coal generation plant before both shut down in 2019.
Meanwhile, the Salt River Project , the publicly owned Arizona utility that owned the power plant, retained 225 of its 433 workers, said SRP spokesperson Scott Harelson.
In 2016, when Dayton Power & Light Co.
Xcel, for example, started its transition a year or two ahead of time.
They work at Duke Energy Corp.’s Belews Creek coal plant, northeast of Winston-Salem, N.C.
Pierce, 33, is an operations technician, which means checking oil levels and pressures and responding to alarms around the plant.
Pope, the mechanic, is learning electrical skills like how to use an amp meter or rack out a circuit breaker.
The idea is that with fewer jobs, everyone will wear more hats.
Steve Farner, the executive director of the Laborers International Union of North America, pointed out all the heavy equipment a coal plant needs.
“Barges, trains tracks, coal-handling equipment, conveyors, heavy machinery that needs lots of maintenance and refitting at regular intervals.
At the end of 2020, Duke had almost 8,800 MW of wind, solar or biomass power either built or in the pipeline.
Pierce, the coal plant operations technician, looks forward to what he’ll be able to do with his new training.
As far as he knows, that means he’ll continue to work at Belews Creek, an hour’s drive from where he lives.
In Stokes County, where the Belews Creek plant sits, utility workers are far outnumbered by jobs in manufacturing, retail and health care.
Now on the yaw deck, his next test was to screw 56 bolts to the proper torque in the space of 10 minutes.
At the outset of 2020, he became one of six Consumers Energy workers to join a union apprenticeship program to become a renewable specialist.
The apprenticeship sprang from conversations three years ago between Consumers Energy and Power for America, an organization that trains workers who are part of the Utility Workers Union of America.
They work with circuits and test equipment and get familiar with harnesses and carabiners.
Today, Consumers operates two wind farms with a total capacity of 80 MW and a third starting next month, with a goal of 1,000 MW by 2024 and 6,000 MW by 2040, said Wheeler.
He resides on his wife’s family’s farm, and one of the wind turbines whirls just a half-mile away, above the hay and rye and cattle.
“Anyone that I have shown a picture to has just been in awe,” Lammi said of the times he sallies up to change the air filters or lubricate bearings in the turbine’s nacelle.
Even though he now works within it every day and can see it out his window, he questions how clean wind power actually is.
Pierce and Pope, the two coal workers at Duke Energy, shrugged when asked about whether they were excited about participating in clean energy.
Lammi has seen coal and wind in action, and he shares those doubts.