My name is Euan MacKinnon and my internship is with GE Energy; specifically the Wind Energy department which has its European headquarters located outside the small village of Salzbergen in North-Western Germany. Myself and the other intern placed here, Joe MacDonald, have spent the first week of our internship preparing to go onsite with a GFO (Global Field Operations) team. It has been an interesting experience so far to see what it is like to work for an organisation as large as GE. The staff are very friendly and although most are German, speak excellent English.
After being supplied with a laptop and security pass I quickly found myself feeling at home in the conference room we were stationed in to carry out tasks such as completing some fascinating HSE courses. During which time I have taken a shine to the free bottles of carbonated water supplied by the company; something I would not have previously advocated. Over the week we have had meetings with various people who are in charge of the different aspects involved in supplying customers with wind turbines. The outcome of the meetings is that we started to gain an understanding of the nature of the wind turbine industry which has become increasingly demanding and customer centric. The competition from companies like Vestas and Siemens means that the customer gets to pick and choose the turbine manufacturer; resulting in companies sometimes having to sell at a loss in order to shift units.
The project management team is the nucleus of operations and works closely with other departments to meet the challenge of sourcing and transporting turbine components across the world to meet the small fiscally viable window where contracts are completed under budget. We are being sent to Zensko in Poland to oversee how a project comes together and to see if we can spot any room for improvement in the installation and commissioning (essentially bringing the turbine online) processes. The GFO department in which we are working in are the project managers eyes on the ground and it will be interesting to see everything come together (hopefully smoothly) over the next few weeks.
On Friday we underwent a course in high rescue training so that we could ascend a wind turbine which was pretty cool. Most rescues culminate in the casualty being pushed off the turbine 100m from the ground on an abseil, although thankfully, this is extremely rare. One of the reasons for the scarcity of incidents is the strict health and safety standards employed by everyone involved in operations. An example of this is that while the pretty much all inclusive Medical we underwent in the UK was sufficient for Germany and Italy (we were supposed to go to Italy), Poland requires a different one.
For detail on a day to day basis see Joe’s Blog as I didn’t want to repeat everything. Next week’s blog should be interesting and quite different, less business more heavy engineering!