MY SHORTCOMINGS were cruelly brought home again on New Mexico's windswept eastern plains, at the North American Wind Research and Training Center, at Mesalands Community College. Already booming with career changers, community colleges will serve as the states' primary renewable-energy training grounds. San Juan College, up in Farmington, started offering a one-year solar-energy certificate back in 2000—and now has an eight-year waiting list. In Tucumcari, where Mesalands' new 1.5-megawatt turbine spins 300 feet above the neon of Route 66, the training center was hatching its first class of wind technicians.

The first myth busted by program director Tracy Rascoe was the idea that you can breeze your way to a green job. People have this idea, the former Navy sonar operator said, that they can just "go to the Mesalands drive-through, pull up to the box, and say, Yes, I'd love an associate of applied science in wind-energy technology!"

Not so fast. Rascoe, a soft-spoken guy with a salt-and-pepper goatee and a sweet 102cc Yamaha motorcycle, has been training wind techs since 2000. Beyond the willingness to climb 300 feet up in a turbine in conditions ranging from 128 degrees to 60 below, he says, they have to be proficient in mechanical, electrical, hydraulic, and computer systems. Rascoe's job is to impart all this to 25 men and three women from nine states, including a homeschooled 17-year-old Mennonite kid and a tattooed Vietnam vet in his late fifties.

"How's it going?" Rascoe asked the class.

"Plugging along," somebody volunteered.

"Anything else?"

"Notice our big baby's cranking away!"

Indeed, the massive GE turbine's three 121-foot-long blades were casting quick shadows on the dirt lot outside—whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. Inside its huge tubular tower, painted futuristic white and filled with a steady thrum, was an intimidating wall of circuit boards controlled by a tiny laptop, all of it dwarfed by a 300-foot ladder soaring up into the darkness. It was the perfect student lab. But no touchy the turbine until you've crossed a few academic hurdles.

Rascoe settled me in at the computer lab with a group working on their e-learning modules, and I started clicking through Basics of Hydraulic Motors, diligently scribbling notes about actuators and fluid pressure until I was ready for the "self-test."

Buzz! Zzzzz! Ten out of ten wrong.

"This could be the beginning of a whole new career for you," the guy next to me joked. But while I was off to a rough start, my scores did improve, thank you. Plus my poor mechanical skills didn't rule me out for admission—all I'd need to be accepted was high-school-level English and math, a $200 deposit, and the ability to lift 75 pounds. Most people in the class, in fact, had post-secondary degrees: Chris used to be a mortgage broker in Albany. Taylor was a National Guard trombonist. Max had just sold his landscaping company in Fort Worth. And Chase, a Kentucky native, ran logistics for a freight company before diesel climbed to $5 a gallon last summer.

The program takes two years, it's true, but in-state tuition is only $600 a semester—a pretty good investment for a job that starts at $25 to $35 an hour. "Now's the time," Rascoe told the students over in the AC/DC electricity lab. "You don't get a second chance out there to learn this foundation stuff. You're up in a turbine and you have a situation, you can't call Mommy and Daddy."

If they learned their skills cold, he constantly reminded them, the opportunities were huge. Rascoe had seen good people move up from techs to vice presidents in five or six years. "A wind turbine doesn't go whoosh, whoosh, whoosh," he said. "It's ching, ching, ching!"