Wind farm tour encourages female students to consider STEM-based careers

A cohort of 20 female students drawn from schools across regional Victoria gained an insight into the State’s renewable energy future, thanks to a site tour of the Golden Plains Wind Farm Project.

The site tour was arranged by the Geelong Manufacturing Council as part of their 9-month Seed2STEM program which aims to provide female students with immersive industry experiences to encourage them to consider a STEM-based career path.

MPK and Vestas were hosts of the wind farm site tour and one of 16 Victorian projects to be visited by the students as part of their Seed2STEM journey.

With the project’s civil construction on a rostered day off, MPK and Vestas were able to provide students with a much closer insight into every element of the development of the southern hemisphere’s largest ever wind farm project.

From constructing 100+kms of access roads and concrete batching plants and protecting our cultural heritage and environment, right through to showcasing the sheer size of the concrete foundations required to house the 230m high wind turbine generators.

MPK Project Director Con Anagnos said it was a pleasure hosting the cohort and demonstrating not just the immense size of the Golden Plains Wind Farm Project and the level of planning, design and construction that goes into it, but also conveying how STEM-based learning can lead to careers in projects just like it.

“MPK is a big supporter of encouraging females to join MPK and also the nation’s energy sector to forge out industry careers, but a big part of the success of this aim is getting in early and focusing on young female students currently contemplating their education pathway during high school,” Con said.

?“Providing opportunities for these students to get a close insight into how the renewable energy sector works, showing them first-hand what we do out in the field and encouraging them to ask questions about what a career in our industry looks like is really valuable and enables them to make more informed decisions about their future career ambitions.

“I think immersive programs like Seed2STEM, supported by real life project site tours is important for the next generation of our industry’s workforce and could very well result in us seeing an increase in females taking up careers as engineers and project managers and participating in the delivery of large-scale projects just like ours,” he said.