Bringing a project to a group of land owners and helping them understand the project,
and that becomes a whole series of value added agriculture.
Now they see a way to harvest the value of the wind
It’s the most fun I’ve ever had in my life. I’ve done a lot of things in the last 30 years, and the last 7 or 8 have been far and away the most fun.
My name is Pat Pelstring. I’m actually one of the founders and an officer of National Wind.
Day to day I’m a Wind Developer.
As a Wind Developer, I really direct what what will turn out to be about a 30,000 acre site.
We need to go out and tie up the land. We’ll assess the wind. We’ll put up MET towers.
And the key thing is getting the transmission and interconnection done.
But once all those things are completed, we’ve got a site that we can start marketing to utilities
and doing the more specific planning of a layout of a wind park and talking to utilities about buying the power from us.
I spend about half the time in the office... obviously a lot of phone calls following up with people,
a lot of computer work, financial analysis and review.
The other half is pretty much in the field. We’re out talking to land owners, out visiting with people to get projects financed.
We need to be out in the field with out consultants understanding the site
and making a lot of decisions on the fly, out in the field.
The office is open from 8:30 - 5:00. Last night I was at a public hearing until about 10:30 at night.
So, you know, I’ll get my 60 or 70 hours in one way or the other... that’s fairly common for the industry.
I’ve got a four year bachelor of arts degree.
I spent quite bit of time in finance... believe it or not I was a philosophy major,
which may not sound like it’s that applicable but, you know, you do a lot of problem solving.
I spent about 20 years in community economic development.
I’d been dealing with land owners in rural communities for a long time anyway working on projects.
I really came at it from a business finance standpoint. Most of our employees have come from other fields.
Real estate developers; we’ve got some marketing specialists that have come out of marketing and sales...
Really any kind of active problem solving development activity is a pretty good background.
Everybody’s got their laptop...and you need those in the field as well,
but in addition to that, for instance, we’ll have MET towers.
A lot of GPS, you know, the winds are based upon the topography, elevation...
so we’ll send people out with GPS and equipment like that to help assess a site.
There’s a lot of title work that needs to be done,
so people that are used to working with the county court house
and being familiar with understanding the documents there... that’s pretty important.
It took me about six or eight months to understand what the key in terms of being successful in the job is.
But the one that keeps ringing true is, you really need to be a problem solver.
If this is a two, or three, or four year process
to start from ground zero get a site ready to develop,
in the meantime you’ll have a thousand problems to solve... and it’s a new one every day
and you need to be creative, you need to be responsive, and persistent.
The major misconception is that’s it probably a little... from the outside it looks a little easier than it actually is.
You take these turbines, set them up, and connect them to the grid... that’s what most people see.
Actually getting the power sold,
getting the land owners comfortable with the projects...
the transmission and interconnection is a tremendously complicated process,
and there might be ten or twelve developments competing for one project.
and so you need to be able to position your project and make it worthwhile to get the contract.
It’s becoming much more sophisticated in terms of specialization.
I know a little bit about everything in the industry, but now we’re hiring...
We’ve got a staff of six people, and all they do is worry about our wind data and
How we set up the MET towers; how we collect it; what’s the value of the wind?
Generally the more successful companies are the ones that are getting larger and they got more
specialization so they can attack each of those issues.
Education is important to us. We think it’s certainly... it may not apply directly to what they going to do day to day,
but it clearly demonstrates their interest and commitment to moving forward.
The other thing I would say is that people really need to learn the industry.
When we get the volume of people that are interested...
if they haven’t checked out our website, know our projects, understand a lot of the basics of wind,
it shows through very clearly. And the people that have... those are the ones that get the extra attention.
This really brings a lot of the features of what I’ve done in my life together.
I love to work with people, I love to solve problems
and even though it takes two.. three.. four.. five years before you build a project
the satisfaction of getting there is tremendous!