Adapted from an interview with Christopher Bruce by Brennon Edwards.

I was born and raised in Farmington, Michigan, in a real big family. I attended Farmington High School, then community college for about a year and a half, and then started my career in the automotive industry. It was the biggest thing going on in Michigan—that's pretty much all there was. Everybody wanted to be an engineer. Everybody wanted to be associated with auto­motive in some way.

My first major job was in a town called Westland. I was a pattern maker, building molds for automotive parts. It was a great job, but then 2009–2010 happened. Times were bad. Hours were cut. Our boss did pretty much everything he could to keep us paid, but I was just next in line and I lost my job. I was devastated. Even though you know it's coming, I still have bills. I still have a mortgage. I still have a car payment. Not to mention it was a horrible time for real estate, which I also dabbled in. So that didn't help me out either.

I had about three days of sulk—sat on the couch and really didn't do too much. On the third day, I remembered a coworker's advice: Look into wind turbines.

Lo and behold, the Michigan Institute of Aviation & Technology in New Boston had a power-generation program that included wind turbines. So literally that third day I enrolled, and I started school two weeks after that. I'd say 75 percent of the people there were going through the same struggle; they were trying to find a new niche. They were afraid that they'd never have jobs in automotive again. So there was a lot of reinvention going on.

It was an 11-month course, eight hours a day, five days a week. I looked for jobs to supplement things but really couldn't find anything. After six months, I wound up losing my house but continued going to school. Luckily, I have a lot of good friends and family; I ended up in my uncle's basement until I graduated.

I put out resumes to about 150 different companies. Three months later, I finally got that call for the big interview and ended up getting a job. It was dead center in the middle of Iowa, a big company with 200 wind turbines. I was in Ames, which is a pretty awesome town to live in if you ever have to move somewhere—some of the nicest people I've ever met, really, helped me get through some tough times.

I worked there for 13 months, and then this Invenergy wind farm opened up in Michigan, only an hour and a half away from all my friends and family. They gave me an opportunity to be a wind tech, and I progressed from there to be a lead wind technician. About three years after that, I was accepted for a management position, so here I am now.

My job title is operations and maintenance manager. I do quite a bit: I've got to be a tech. I've got to be an accountant. I've got to be an admin. I've got to be the safety guy. My job encompasses first and foremost safety—that's honestly before production. I also have days where I'm just a technician and I'll head out to the tower.

I take a lot of pride in the fact that our turbines run so well. We do a good job maintaining them and doing our job the right way. We're already in the process of constructing two new sites. That's going to create hundreds of jobs.

Honestly, the whole clean energy movement just makes sense. You're producing great energy, it's cost-effective now, and you're not putting emissions out into the air. It's just the right thing to do.

This article was funded by the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign (beyondcoal.org).

This article appeared in the September/October 2018 edition with the headline "Changing Gears."