ENERGY: Long awaited solar construction jobs are snapped up
Construction workers, many unemployed at least a year, are eager to help build the giant solar power plants in the Mojave desert as those construction projects get under way.
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STAN LIM/RIVERSIDE PRESS ENTERPRISE STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Construction continues at the BrightSource solar thermal project in the Mojave Desert near the California/Nevada border. The project and other solar projects in the desert have brought welcome jobs to the Inland construction industry.
BY LESLIE BERKMAN
STAFF WRITER
Riverside Press Enterprise
Published: 24 December 2011 03:29 PM
Soon after he reported to work in the desert of northeast San Bernardino County, where he is helping to build a 370-megawatt solar power plant, Lee Russell mailed a postcard to his son and daughter at his family’s home in Beaumont.
“I told them I am part of something big,” he said with pronounced pride.
About two years ago, Russell, a former trucker, was struggling to find work and scrimping to make ends meet when he read about solar projects proposed in Inland Southern California’s Mojave Desert that would be the foundation for a burgeoning new industry for construction workers.
He applied to join one of the construction union locals. He scored high on an entrance test to become an apprentice operating engineer and then spent seven months in training.
In his second week as an apprentice at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating system construction site, Russell, 37, was earning almost $24 an hour and additional pay of $30 a day to compensate him for living away from home.
Russell is among 700 union craft workers employed by Bechtel Corp to build the $2.2 billion thermal solar power plant, which is expected to be the largest in the world. They will install thousands of mirrors called heliostats to focus the power of the sun on water-filled boilers that sit atop three giant steel towers under construction within view of motorists on Interstate 15. The intense heat will create steam to drive an electricity-generating turbine. The project being developed by BrightSource Energy Inc. sprawls over 3,600 acres of desert.
Construction began slowly in October 2010 and has been ramping up. Since about June, Bechtel has been hiring at the rate of 20 to 30 new workers a week, according to Bob Regalado, Bechtel’s labor relations representative. When construction activity peaks next summer, as many as 1,400 workers will be employed at the site. Hundreds are expected to remain until the plant is completed in the second half of 2013.
The Ivanpah project is at the forefront of a growing list of massive thermal and photovoltaic solar plant projects getting under way in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. The rush is prompted by the need for California investor-owned utilities to meet the state-mandated goal of procuring 33 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020 to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.
Three other solar plants — the Abengoa Mojave Solar Project in San Bernardino County and the Genesis and Desert Sunlight projects in Riverside County — also are beginning construction. Another 24 solar projects that are 100 megawatts or larger, including another BrightSource plant 13 miles southwest of Blythe, are moving through the government approval process.
“It is the largest single industry boom I have ever seen in the Inland Empire,” said Jerry James, solar project manager for CLP Skilled Trades Solutions, a temporary construction workforce agency. He estimates that solar plants taking shape in Riverside and San Bernardino counties will provide construction jobs for at least the next five years.
The giant solar projects have been eagerly anticipated because Inland construction workers have watched employment in their field drop 57 percent to 57,100 jobs. That contrasts with the 132,600 jobs in place in June 2006 at the height of the housing boom.
It has taken years for the solar jobs to materialize because of the lengthy government approval regimen required before building can begin. Delays have stemmed from a need to address controversial environmental issues such as the impact on the habitat of desert tortoises and because many of the solar projects are planned on large stretches of public land regulated by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
NATIONAL JOB INTEREST
Union locals throughout Riverside and San Bernardino counties report that solar plant expansion in the Mojave Desert has sparked the interest of unemployed people nationwide.
“We have a waiting list and are building up a larger waiting list,” said Bob Frost, business manager with International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers 440 in Riverside.
A sign of the weak economy is that applicants include “accountants, teachers, firemen and paramedics. We would not usually be seeing them, but with all the cutbacks they need work,” Frost said.
Although union members from other parts of the country can go on special waiting lists, Regalado reports that about 80 percent of those working on the Ivanpah project come from the Inland Empire. When he needs workers, he calls union locals in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.
Some contractors such as Bechtel are hiring exclusively through the union. But CLP Skilled Trades Solutions, an agency specializing in recruiting construction workers, has an agreement to supply many of the workers for the Desert Sunlight solar plant that First Solar is developing near Desert Center.
James at CLP said he has been astounded by the number of people applying to work on the Desert Sunlight plant. At a single job fair last summer in Coachella, CLP handed out 1,200 applications. So far his company has placed 100 workers at Desert Sunlight and has another 127 people screened and ready to work as construction activity picks up at the project.
EXPERIENCE HELPS
Most of the jobs at solar construction projects are going to union craftsmen and others with construction experience. George Puddephatt, development specialist for Riverside County Workforce Development in Indio, said the first graduates of solar technology classes at College of the Desert who were hired to work at Desert Sunlight had a construction background.
One of the early hires was Mario Alberto Rios, 50, whose résumé includes nearly 24 years in commercial and residential construction.
Rios, who lives in Indio, said he searched for work for two years — which he called “a nightmare” — before he enrolled in a free course at College of the Desert to learn how to install solar panels. He said after he completed the course, he applied for a job at Desert Sunlight through the workforce development office in Indio.
When he started working at the solar construction site in mid-September, he was paid almost $43 an hour as a laborer installing the posts to which the solar panels are attached. He said since then he has been promoted and his wages have increased to about $59 an hour.
Rios, 50, said he considers his work “like a blessing. I see people begging for work everywhere and they have no success.”
The solar industry also threw a lifeline to 59-year-old Don Boles, a 16-year veteran Teamster construction worker. The Yucaipa resident said he was jobless for 18 months and about to run out of unemployment benefits when he was hired for the Ivanpah project, where he figures he will remain another two years.
His experience is not unique.
‘A GODSEND’
“This is a godsend for a lot of people. They are glad to be working,” said Tim West, 46, a carpenter at Ivanpah who on a recent Wednesday evening was drinking a beer and dabbling at video poker, betting a quarter a hand, in the casino of Buffalo Bill’s hotel in Primm, a small gambling town on the Nevada side of the California/Nevada border.
He stays in Primm on Monday through Thursday, then drives home to Highland for a three-day weekend with his family. “I’m not a big gambler. It is the first time I have been here all week,” said West, who wore a baseball cap, the fashion that identified the construction workers in the casino.
The downside to working on a remote desert project, the men said, include extreme temperatures — oppressive heat and freezing cold — and so much time away from home in hotel rooms. “The biggest thing I miss is home-cooked meals,” said West. He said he also missed his 8-year-old daughter he called his “buddy.”
Most evenings, West said, “I hang out in my room and watch TV and have a couple beers and call it a night. My alarm goes off in the morning at a quarter after 4.” Despite the downside of the job, he said, “It beats the heck out of unemployment” and pays about $20 an hour.
Fecundo Velasco, a 55-year-old carpenter, said he has two sons and two nephews working with him at Ivanpah. The Fontana resident said he was unemployed only two months before he landed the solar job. But he said one of his nephews was out of work for more than two years before he was hired on the project.
Velasco said he has still more relatives who want a chance at solar plant construction. “It is the only thing happening,” he said.
Some construction novices are able to break into the solar field as union apprentices.
COMPETITIVE PROCESS
Selection of plumbing and pipe fitting apprentices is “extremely competitive,” said Bryan Smith, organizer for the pipe fitter union’s local in Colton that supplies workers to the Ivanpah project. He said he gets about 100 calls a day from prospective apprentices.
“What we are looking for are people who want to make this a career and not just work two or three years on a project,” he said. About 85percent of applicants fail the seventh-grade level math test, he said, and those who pass the test are interviewed. Then he said applicants are ranked by their test and interview scores and placed in that order on a waiting list.
James at CLP said that, for the past three months, he has assigned three staff members “to do nothing but answer phones and process applications” for people wanting jobs at Desert Sunlight. One of the attractions is that because the project is financed with a federal loan guarantee, it must provide prevailing wages, which are the cash equivalent of union hourly pay plus benefits.
Each morning, shuttle buses provided by the project’s developer, First Solar, pick up workers at Blythe and Indio and drive them 58 miles to the Desert Sunlight construction site, giving them breakfast on the way. The buses make a return trip in the afternoon, delivering the workers to where they have parked their cars.
At Ivanpah, Bechtel says it pays hourly wages ranging from about $15 for entry-level apprentices to $40 for journeymen and more for foremen. Most workers also get $20 to $80 a day, depending on their craft, to cover the expense of living away from home.
The vast majority live at in Primm, where the casino hotels give them a special rate, while others live in trailer parks or get together to rent apartments in Las Vegas.
Gary Gonzales, assistant business manager for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers local 477 in San Bernardino, said he has 100 members working at Ivanpah and expects to assign another 100 there when construction activity peaks.
Moreover, he said the hiring of electricians soon would begin for construction of another large thermal solar power plant by a subsidiary of Abengoa Solar Inc. halfway between Barstow and Kramer Junction.
“It is very important,” Gonzales said of the solar projects. “It is what is keeping us afloat now.”
Where to call
If you are interested in learning about job opportunities at solar power projects in Inland Southern California, here are to places to contact:
San Bernardino and Riverside Counties Building and Construction Trades Council: 951-684-1040
CLP Skilled Trades Solutions: 714-300-0510
“I told them I am part of something big,” he said with pronounced pride.
About two years ago, Russell, a former trucker, was struggling to find work and scrimping to make ends meet when he read about solar projects proposed in Inland Southern California’s Mojave Desert that would be the foundation for a burgeoning new industry for construction workers.
He applied to join one of the construction union locals. He scored high on an entrance test to become an apprentice operating engineer and then spent seven months in training.
In his second week as an apprentice at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating system construction site, Russell, 37, was earning almost $24 an hour and additional pay of $30 a day to compensate him for living away from home.
Russell is among 700 union craft workers employed by Bechtel Corp to build the $2.2 billion thermal solar power plant, which is expected to be the largest in the world. They will install thousands of mirrors called heliostats to focus the power of the sun on water-filled boilers that sit atop three giant steel towers under construction within view of motorists on Interstate 15. The intense heat will create steam to drive an electricity-generating turbine. The project being developed by BrightSource Energy Inc. sprawls over 3,600 acres of desert.
Construction began slowly in October 2010 and has been ramping up. Since about June, Bechtel has been hiring at the rate of 20 to 30 new workers a week, according to Bob Regalado, Bechtel’s labor relations representative. When construction activity peaks next summer, as many as 1,400 workers will be employed at the site. Hundreds are expected to remain until the plant is completed in the second half of 2013.
The Ivanpah project is at the forefront of a growing list of massive thermal and photovoltaic solar plant projects getting under way in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. The rush is prompted by the need for California investor-owned utilities to meet the state-mandated goal of procuring 33 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020 to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.
Three other solar plants — the Abengoa Mojave Solar Project in San Bernardino County and the Genesis and Desert Sunlight projects in Riverside County — also are beginning construction. Another 24 solar projects that are 100 megawatts or larger, including another BrightSource plant 13 miles southwest of Blythe, are moving through the government approval process.
“It is the largest single industry boom I have ever seen in the Inland Empire,” said Jerry James, solar project manager for CLP Skilled Trades Solutions, a temporary construction workforce agency. He estimates that solar plants taking shape in Riverside and San Bernardino counties will provide construction jobs for at least the next five years.
The giant solar projects have been eagerly anticipated because Inland construction workers have watched employment in their field drop 57 percent to 57,100 jobs. That contrasts with the 132,600 jobs in place in June 2006 at the height of the housing boom.
It has taken years for the solar jobs to materialize because of the lengthy government approval regimen required before building can begin. Delays have stemmed from a need to address controversial environmental issues such as the impact on the habitat of desert tortoises and because many of the solar projects are planned on large stretches of public land regulated by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
NATIONAL JOB INTEREST
Union locals throughout Riverside and San Bernardino counties report that solar plant expansion in the Mojave Desert has sparked the interest of unemployed people nationwide.
“We have a waiting list and are building up a larger waiting list,” said Bob Frost, business manager with International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers 440 in Riverside.
A sign of the weak economy is that applicants include “accountants, teachers, firemen and paramedics. We would not usually be seeing them, but with all the cutbacks they need work,” Frost said.
Although union members from other parts of the country can go on special waiting lists, Regalado reports that about 80 percent of those working on the Ivanpah project come from the Inland Empire. When he needs workers, he calls union locals in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.
Some contractors such as Bechtel are hiring exclusively through the union. But CLP Skilled Trades Solutions, an agency specializing in recruiting construction workers, has an agreement to supply many of the workers for the Desert Sunlight solar plant that First Solar is developing near Desert Center.
James at CLP said he has been astounded by the number of people applying to work on the Desert Sunlight plant. At a single job fair last summer in Coachella, CLP handed out 1,200 applications. So far his company has placed 100 workers at Desert Sunlight and has another 127 people screened and ready to work as construction activity picks up at the project.
EXPERIENCE HELPS
Most of the jobs at solar construction projects are going to union craftsmen and others with construction experience. George Puddephatt, development specialist for Riverside County Workforce Development in Indio, said the first graduates of solar technology classes at College of the Desert who were hired to work at Desert Sunlight had a construction background.
One of the early hires was Mario Alberto Rios, 50, whose résumé includes nearly 24 years in commercial and residential construction.
Rios, who lives in Indio, said he searched for work for two years — which he called “a nightmare” — before he enrolled in a free course at College of the Desert to learn how to install solar panels. He said after he completed the course, he applied for a job at Desert Sunlight through the workforce development office in Indio.
When he started working at the solar construction site in mid-September, he was paid almost $43 an hour as a laborer installing the posts to which the solar panels are attached. He said since then he has been promoted and his wages have increased to about $59 an hour.
Rios, 50, said he considers his work “like a blessing. I see people begging for work everywhere and they have no success.”
The solar industry also threw a lifeline to 59-year-old Don Boles, a 16-year veteran Teamster construction worker. The Yucaipa resident said he was jobless for 18 months and about to run out of unemployment benefits when he was hired for the Ivanpah project, where he figures he will remain another two years.
His experience is not unique.
‘A GODSEND’
“This is a godsend for a lot of people. They are glad to be working,” said Tim West, 46, a carpenter at Ivanpah who on a recent Wednesday evening was drinking a beer and dabbling at video poker, betting a quarter a hand, in the casino of Buffalo Bill’s hotel in Primm, a small gambling town on the Nevada side of the California/Nevada border.
He stays in Primm on Monday through Thursday, then drives home to Highland for a three-day weekend with his family. “I’m not a big gambler. It is the first time I have been here all week,” said West, who wore a baseball cap, the fashion that identified the construction workers in the casino.
The downside to working on a remote desert project, the men said, include extreme temperatures — oppressive heat and freezing cold — and so much time away from home in hotel rooms. “The biggest thing I miss is home-cooked meals,” said West. He said he also missed his 8-year-old daughter he called his “buddy.”
Most evenings, West said, “I hang out in my room and watch TV and have a couple beers and call it a night. My alarm goes off in the morning at a quarter after 4.” Despite the downside of the job, he said, “It beats the heck out of unemployment” and pays about $20 an hour.
Fecundo Velasco, a 55-year-old carpenter, said he has two sons and two nephews working with him at Ivanpah. The Fontana resident said he was unemployed only two months before he landed the solar job. But he said one of his nephews was out of work for more than two years before he was hired on the project.
Velasco said he has still more relatives who want a chance at solar plant construction. “It is the only thing happening,” he said.
Some construction novices are able to break into the solar field as union apprentices.
COMPETITIVE PROCESS
Selection of plumbing and pipe fitting apprentices is “extremely competitive,” said Bryan Smith, organizer for the pipe fitter union’s local in Colton that supplies workers to the Ivanpah project. He said he gets about 100 calls a day from prospective apprentices.
“What we are looking for are people who want to make this a career and not just work two or three years on a project,” he said. About 85percent of applicants fail the seventh-grade level math test, he said, and those who pass the test are interviewed. Then he said applicants are ranked by their test and interview scores and placed in that order on a waiting list.
James at CLP said that, for the past three months, he has assigned three staff members “to do nothing but answer phones and process applications” for people wanting jobs at Desert Sunlight. One of the attractions is that because the project is financed with a federal loan guarantee, it must provide prevailing wages, which are the cash equivalent of union hourly pay plus benefits.
Each morning, shuttle buses provided by the project’s developer, First Solar, pick up workers at Blythe and Indio and drive them 58 miles to the Desert Sunlight construction site, giving them breakfast on the way. The buses make a return trip in the afternoon, delivering the workers to where they have parked their cars.
At Ivanpah, Bechtel says it pays hourly wages ranging from about $15 for entry-level apprentices to $40 for journeymen and more for foremen. Most workers also get $20 to $80 a day, depending on their craft, to cover the expense of living away from home.
The vast majority live at in Primm, where the casino hotels give them a special rate, while others live in trailer parks or get together to rent apartments in Las Vegas.
Gary Gonzales, assistant business manager for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers local 477 in San Bernardino, said he has 100 members working at Ivanpah and expects to assign another 100 there when construction activity peaks.
Moreover, he said the hiring of electricians soon would begin for construction of another large thermal solar power plant by a subsidiary of Abengoa Solar Inc. halfway between Barstow and Kramer Junction.
“It is very important,” Gonzales said of the solar projects. “It is what is keeping us afloat now.”
Where to call
If you are interested in learning about job opportunities at solar power projects in Inland Southern California, here are to places to contact:
San Bernardino and Riverside Counties Building and Construction Trades Council: 951-684-1040
CLP Skilled Trades Solutions: 714-300-0510
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