Apprenticeship instructor Mike Merbach saw row after row of wind turbines towering over the North Sea.

He said it made him think of the jobs his electrical apprentices at Fox Valley Technical College could get building turbines in the Great Lakes.

That was in 2006, when Merbach took some Associated Builders and Contractors of Wisconsin apprentices to Denmark. One of his Danish study abroad students took the group on a helicopter trip over the Elsam Offshore Wind Farm (JPG), which has 10 rows of turbines with eight in each row.

"He called me when I was over there, and then he said, ‘Get to the airport,'" Merbach said. "The next thing I know, I'm being fitted into a flight suit and being trained in how to crash in a helicopter, and I'm asking, ‘Hey, what the hell is going on?'"

Merbach also got a rundown of the construction work it took to build the turbines, which were rooted to the North Sea floor.

As groups in Wisconsin raise eyebrows over the possibility of building wind farms in Lake Michigan or Lake Superior, Merbach sees it as an opportunity for his students.

"Somebody's going to have to lay the wire out to them," he said. "Somebody's going to have to hook them up. Somebody's going to have to build them."

There are a lot of engineering and economic questions that need answering before turbines sprout from Lake Michigan. But one thing's for sure: The wind out there dwarfs anything found on Wisconsin's land, said Robert Owen, wind energy consultant, mechanical engineer and meteorologist in Middleton. Owen studied the data collected by the wind sensors set up by the Great Lakes Environmental Research Lab off the coasts of Milwaukee, Kenosha, Chicago and Muskegon, Mich.

"We can't do gigawatt-scale wind farms in Wisconsin," he said. "We can do them in Lake Michigan."

Even with all that juice blowing in the wind, it may not be worth the investment of building towers to harness it, Owen said. The only proven technology for off-shore turbines is to build towers that have foundations in the ground. But those can only be built in more shallow water closer to the coast, and they're extremely expensive, he said.

It may be cheaper to put the turbines on floating platforms, much like an oil-drilling rig tethered to the sea bed, he said. Although that technology isn't proven, Norwegian oil company Norse Energy Corp. is planning to test the technology because turbines could power its off-shore oil platforms, he said.

"There is some reason to believe that it may actually be less expensive to go into the deeper waters and use moored turbines," he said. "We would have a better wind resource. The wind would increase on the order of a mile or two per hour. We would also have less of a visual impact."

As both Owen and Merbach noted, Wisconsin has many shipbuilders that could build off-shore floating rigs. Merbach said some of his apprentices got jobs wiring ships full time after getting training wiring the new Staten Island ferries that Marinette Marine Corp. built.

Michael Vickerman, executive director of RENEW Wisconsin, said there's nobody in the middle of Lake Michigan to start campaigns opposing wind farms. However, building on water is a good 10 years away, he estimated, and there's plenty of space left on land to build turbines in Wisconsin.

"It'll probably have an important part to play in the future," he said of off-shore wind farming. "I don't know when that future will arrive."