Global Wind Organization (GWO)

What It Is

The Global Wind Organization is a nonprofit industry association headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark. Major turbine manufacturers and wind farm owners, including Vestas, Siemens Wind Power, Ørsted, Vattenfall, and Enercon, founded it in 2009 and agreed at a meeting in Esbjerg, Denmark, to accept one another's safety training if it met a shared standard. GWO published its first standard, Basic Safety Training, in 2012, and a Basic Technical Training standard in 2017. Basic Safety Training covers first aid, manual handling, fire awareness, and working at heights, with an added sea survival module for offshore work. Certified providers deliver training worldwide, and each technician's certificates are recorded in a global database called WINDA and expire after two years.

Why It Matters

For a wind turbine technician, GWO training is close to a passport. Because the companies that build and own most of the world's turbines helped create and adopt the standard, a technician who completes Basic Safety Training can work for many employers and on many turbine models without repeating the same courses. The standard also means that the person on the other end of your safety line, whatever company they work for, has been trained to rescue you the same way you were trained to rescue them. That shared foundation is a large part of why an inherently dangerous job can be done safely every day.