It was only a couple of years ago that all nine service bays at Christensen Shipyard in Vancouver were filled with 100 foot-plus, multi-million dollar yachts destined for the world luxury market.
Today the 26-year-old facility is well-under capacity – the result of a worldwide economic slump that hit the producers of big-ticket items especially hard.
Like many other executives, Christensen president Joe Foggia made the hard decision to lay-off a substantial part of his workforce. Last week, Foggia got the chance to hire some, if not all of them back.
The federal government awarded Christensen's new business venture, called Renewable Energy Composite Solutions LLC, a $1 million American Assistance and Recovery Act grant on Oct. 6 to produce small wind turbines at the company's Columbia River Road facility.
As a result, 200 temporary and permanent workers – many of them laid-off from the shipyard only months before – will work on the first composite vertical turbines at the new RECS plant by year's end.
"The stimulus plan is not only creating jobs, it's creating jobs in new areas of the economy," said Congressman Brian Baird (D-Vanc.) on a tour last week of RECS' Christensen Shipyard facility.
Baird also touted each RECS turbine unit's potential to offset 60,000 tons of carbon emissions per year. The six-term Democrat sounded warnings earlier this month regarding the discovery of a "dead zone" off the Pacific Northwest coast thought to be caused by the oceans' absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Transforming a shipbuilding operation into one making wind turbines is not a novel concept. A leading U.S. manufacturer of turbine blade parts, Arizona-based TPI Composites, Inc., reconfigured a Rhode Island yacht builder into a center of sustainable energy production a few years ago, according to RECS Director of Operations Brad Given.
In the first full year of the global economic recession, market growth for alternative energy generating equipment like wind turbines outpaced almost every other sector. Sales of small turbines like those planned for RECS topped $156 million worldwide in 2008, up 53 percent from the previous year, according to the American Wind Energy Association.
Christensen currently plans to set aside at least 10,000 square feet of its total 180,000 square-foot facility for wind turbine production, with more space expected to come online as the alternative energy market continues to grow. "We really think that this area is ripe for renewable energy manufacturing," Given said.
Skyron Systems, Inc. of Beaverton, Ore. designed the RECS prototype turbine, which could go into production as soon as the end of the fourth quarter, according to Foggia. Made from 90 percent composite material, the small vertical turbines planned for RECS look more like a child's spinning-top than the white pinwheels found along roadsides in Eastern Oregon and the deserts of California.
According to Skyron Systems CEO Brian Sheets, several advantages of the RECS turbine over its bigger, horizontal blade-equipped cousin include less potential bird strikes and decreased vibration – critical features since the smaller RECS models are more likely to be used in urban settings.
The turbines can be mounted on platforms, rooftops and even on the tops of bridges – which got more than one local elected representative at last week's RECS tour mulling the possibilities.
In response to Baird's question about the feasibility of integrating RECS-built wind turbines into the proposed Columbia River Crossing Project, event attendee Vancouver Mayor Royce Pollard said: "It will certainly give us something else to think about."
