You’ve probably driven past a wind farm before, but have you ever wondered what it’d be like to work there?

As part of Stanwell’s ongoing commitment to provide development pathways for its people, Nathan Champney – a mechanical fitter at Tarong Power Station – is currently on secondment at a wind farm, developing skills he hopes to apply as Stanwell’s own $9 billion pipeline of renewable projects come online. Here, he shares his experience of life at the top of the turbine.

The first thing that hits you when you work on a wind farm is just how tall the turbines are. The turbines here stand well over 100 metres tall, from the ground to the tip of the blade, when the blade is in a vertical position. To get to the nacelle, which is where the generator, gearbox, drive train and brake assembly are housed, we have to climb a series of ladders spanning more than 80 metres.

It’s a good thing I’ve never been afraid of heights.

Most days at the farm start between 6 or 7 am. We work a maximum of 12 hours a day, but we might start early or finish later depending on the weather. Ironically, if it’s a particularly windy day, the conditions might not be safe for us to work, so we’ll try to time our shifts around forecast weather/wind.

Every day begins with a pre-start meeting, where everyone is given their jobs for the day. I’m currently working with a company that specialises in wind turbine gearboxes, to retrofit an upgrade on behalf of the gearbox manufacturer. Other members of the site-based team specialise in routine maintenance and fixing wind turbine faults.

From there, it could be an hour’s drive to the turbine you’re working on. Before you head out to the turbine, you’ve got to be very sure you’ve got all the gear you need – if you get to the turbine and realise you’ve forgotten something, you could find yourself having to go right back to the workshop, four-wheel driving through a goat track and back.

And then we climb.

Getting up to the nacelle is definitely a mission. It’s a logistical challenge, because you don’t just have to get yourself up there. You also have to get your tools to the top – hand tools like spanners and sockets, as well as larger, heavier gear like torque wrenches, power packs and replacement parts.

We generally go in teams of two or three, so you’re never at a turbine by yourself. The way we do it is that the first one or two people will climb to the top, while the last one waits down the bottom with the gear. Then we lift the gear up on a winch. Once we lift the gear up, the last person left at the bottom of the turbine will climb up and meet their mates at the top.

Naturally, we take every precaution, and the whole process is extremely safe. The fall arrest system for climbing up the ladder involves a thick wire cable that goes from the bottom rung of the ladder to the top rung. Every time we go up the ladder, we wear a harness, and a slider that attaches the harness to the cable.

The simplest way to describe it is that it’s like a seatbelt. It allows you to climb freely, but just like a seatbelt will lock into place when you jerk it suddenly, the slider will catch you safely and stop you moving further down the cable if you fall or slip. I’ve never needed to use the slider for this purpose, but I’m certainly glad it’s there.

We also carry self-rescue kits every time we climb. The kit includes things like an emergency defibrillator, a rescue device, a stretcher, and a rescue rope that’s long enough to go all the way from the top of the turbine to the bottom and back again.

Ultimately, climbing the turbine is about trust. We do safety checks on each other’s equipment all the time, and you learn to trust your gear and trust your mates. Once you have that trust, you start to feel comfortable. You take every precaution, and it becomes second nature.

Once you get up there, it’s all systems go. When you’re in the nacelle, you don’t necessarily feel like you’re almost 100 metres up in the air. It just feels like you’re in a little workshop, and you’re using everything you have – your eyes, your ears, your nose – to find the fault and fix it.

(That is, unless it’s a particularly windy day, and then being in the nacelle feels a little bit like being on a boat in rough seas. Luckily, I don’t get seasick, either.) It’s amazing to stop and look around every once in a while, and realise that you’re fixing a turbine in the clouds. There’s something unreal about it – if you like working with your hands, this is the sort of stuff you dream about when you’re a kid.

I’m three months into a year-long secondment here, and I’m just absorbing everything I can like a sponge. I’m hoping it leads to a career in wind energy. I’m a Kingaroy boy, so my goal is to work on a wind farm in Queensland as Stanwell expands its renewable portfolio there.

Who knows? The next wind farm I work on might even have lifts in the turbines – but part of me will miss the ladders.