Field notes › Industries
Rostering crews on wind and solar projects
Renewables construction has become a serious source of labour hire work in Australia, and it puts a particular set of pressures on a roster. The sites are often remote and regional. The construction window is fixed by things nobody controls, from weather to grid connection dates. And the ticket mix moves faster than in established industries, because the equipment and the standards are still settling.
Remote, but not always camp
A wind farm or a large solar project is usually well outside a town large enough to house the workforce, but not always remote enough to justify a full camp. What you get instead is a mix: some crew in local accommodation, some driving in daily from a regional centre, some flying in for a swing.
That mix is harder to roster than either extreme, because the travel arrangements differ per person on the same shift. Accommodation and flights need to live on the shift itself rather than in a separate spreadsheet, and both your office and the client need to see the same version. Anything else produces the classic renewables morning: four people at the gate and one still in a motel two hours away because his booking moved and nobody told him.
The construction window does not move for you
Project schedules in renewables tend to have a hard end, driven by connection agreements and contract dates, and a soft start, driven by whether the earlier trade finished. That combination compresses. When the start slips two weeks and the end does not, your crew requirement for the middle doubles.
Practically, that means the roster needs to be easy to shift wholesale rather than shift by shift, and everyone affected needs to hear about it automatically. If moving a project week means individually ringing 30 people, you will not do it in time, and the mistakes will be in the phone calls rather than the plan.
The ticket mix changes underneath you
Established sites have a stable list of what they require. Renewables sites frequently do not, because the client's own requirements are being written as the industry matures, and different developers land in different places on the same question.
Two consequences. First, requirements need to be held per client site rather than per industry, because two wind projects for different developers may genuinely differ. Second, the day the site adds a requirement, you need to know which of your crew already qualify and which do not, immediately, rather than after a week of spreadsheet work.
The specifics of high risk work licences and their classes are set by the regulator in each state and change from time to time, so confirm them with the regulator rather than assuming what applied on the last project still applies on this one.
Working at height, and everything that follows
Turbine work brings height, rescue and confined space requirements into a workforce that may not have carried them before, along with medicals and fitness requirements that some workers will not pass. That has a rostering consequence people underestimate: your qualified pool for turbine work is much smaller than your total crew, and it does not grow quickly.
Knowing the size of that pool at any moment, and how much of it is committed elsewhere, is the difference between confidently taking on a second project and finding out in week three that you cannot staff either.
Weather, again
Like civil work, renewables construction loses days to weather, and lifts in particular are wind-limited. A stood-down crew that has to be recalled at short notice when conditions clear is the same problem as last-minute cover, at scale.
A published open shift that qualified crew can respond to from their phones beats a phone tree, particularly when half the crew is asleep after nights. The compliance check still runs before anyone is booked, so a fast fill does not become a non-compliant one.
What to have ready before the project starts
Requirements in the client's own words, split by site and role. An honest count of how many of your people qualify today. A training plan with dates for the gap. Travel and accommodation held on the shift where both sides can see it. And an agreed way of telling 30 people at once that next week just moved, without anyone having to remember to do it.
The flights and accommodation post covers the travel side, and civil crews deals with the weather-driven version of the same problem.