by Liam Metcalfe

Matt Malkin is doing his dream and green job. His job helps the environment and the community and it is a job that he loves.

There are many reasons why a wind energy engineer is a very hard Job. First, they do engineering for wind turbines. To be a wind energy engineer Matt Malkin had to go through a lot of training. They use computer simulations and real-life observations. They have to make hard decisions about where to put windfarms. Another reason is they make wind farms work better by finding out why parts broke. Finally, they have to go up very high. As you can see a wind energy engineer is a very important and hard job.

Back when Matt was kid he loved tinkering and was interested in mechanical things. Tinkering means taking things apart and putting it back together to make new things. He also liked to build things with Legos and to scare his cat. He built a buzzing pressure machine and when his cats walked over the rug it would buzz and scare the cat. When Matt was a little kid he wanted to be an engineer. Now he likes to hike and spend time with his daughter. He is doing his dream job. He works on wind turbines and he thinks it is a lot of fun.

When there are problems with the wind turbines he tries to solve them. He helps figure out why blades break. If a blade is broken he goes to the site of the turbine and he looks at the broken parts of the turbine tries to figure out what happened. He looks to see if there was something wrong with the way it was built or if the wind was too strong or if there was lightning. It is important to figure out what went wrong so it will not happen again in the future. Lightning is one of the ways that wind turbines break. They do not break often. When there is too much wind there are two emergency brakes that turn the turbine off so it won’t break. Some of the people that Matt works with make computer models of the turbines to help solve problems.

A typical day for Matt looks like this. He goes to work and if someone calls him about a problem he calls them back and helps them solve the problem. Some days he has to go to the locations of broken turbines. When a turbine is broken he climbs up the turbine and has to climb into the blade. His responsibilities as an engineer are that if there is a problem he helps solve it. There are also lots of little responsibilities.

One time he worked on the biggest blades in the world, bigger than an airplane. It was in Scotland and it was 83 meters high. He figured out why it was a broken because it was vibrating so fast. That is called resonance.

He knows what he is doing. A wind turbine engineer is a hard job. His job helps the community. If turbines work then the community has electricity that is not oil or coal. If you do not burn things then you do not put carbon dioxide in the air and we can avoid climate change!

Matt Malkin helps the community by making electricity so we can power our appliances and everyday items including cell phones, TV, computers, etc. We would like to thank him and his team for giving us the power we need.