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EmpathCMS: Fast, Non-Invasive Fault Detection for Wind Turbines

Allen Hall interviews Dr. Howard Penrose, president and founder of MotorDoc LLC, about the groundbreaking EmpathCMS electrical signature analysis system. Dr. Penrose explains how the technology can quickly and non-invasively detect developing faults in wind turbine components like generators, gearboxes, and bearings, helping to optimize maintenance and prevent unplanned downtime.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

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Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. Our guest today is Dr. Howard Penrose, the president and founder of MotorDoc LLC, and the creator of the groundbreaking EnPath electrical signature analysis system. Dr. Penrose has over 30 years of experience in the field, authoring books, presenting at conferences worldwide, and providing training and consulting services to numerous industries, including wind energy.

The Empath system Dr. Penrose developed is a cutting edge tool for condition monitoring and predictive maintenance of electrical assets like motors, generators, and transformers. By analyzing the unique electrical signatures of equipment, Empath can detect developing faults early, preventing unplanned downtime, optimizing maintenance, and extending equipment life.

Howard, welcome to the program.

Howard Penrose: Thank you very much. And I just have to correct you on one thing. And that’s the Empath system was actually originally developed at Oak Ridge National Labs and is is, construct, is basically built and maintained by Framatome ANP, which is International Nuclear Power Company.

We are their non nuclear distributor and researcher. Large portion of what we do at MotorDoc is research the applications for electrical signature analysis and develop the algorithms.

Allen Hall: So this is, we have a magician here today, so to speak, because the whole thing about wind energy and when you talk to the engineers is the vast majority of them are mechanical engineers.

Drivetrain, blades, right? They know a lot about how the turbine works mechanically. But it is an electrical machine. It’s there to produce electricity. And that means there’s a lot of electric motors and obviously one big generator on the turbine. And that’s the heart of the system. And that’s the part that we really need to work.

What? I think you guys have done is interesting because you’re using the generator to diagnose things that are happening onside the turbine that are not only electrical, but mechanical. You want to explain how that works a little bit?

Howard Penrose: Okay. Well, with vibration analysis, for instance, I will use an accelerometer with a piezoelectric cell or some of the newer technologies that involve etching and certain other things of materials. And you put that on the casing of a machine, and you generate an electrical signal signal in that component, that accelerometer, for instance, or whatever other type of device it is for vibration. So you have to read all the movement of all the components inside the machine through the material.

through that transducer into something else that then translates that data in, either as a rules based system using squiggly lines or a machine learning based system, that kind of thing. Electrical signature analysis is exactly the same thing, except we use the air gap of the machine, whether it’s a generator or a motor or a transformer, as our transducers, the little magnetic field.

In between the components, not the rotor, not the stator. And we gather that information through just straight voltage and current. So the voltage and current comes out we use that and translate it in exactly the same manner we do with vibration. Matter of fact, most vibration analysts will recognize most of the signatures we look at when we’re looking at squiggly lines.

The difference is you have to cross your eyes and stand on your head, but that’s about it.

Allen Hall: So the Empath system, from what I’ve seen online, it measures a couple of voltages and some currents on some wires, which maybe you can describe what you’re actually measuring there.

Howard Penrose: If we’re doing the generator in a wind turbine we’re measuring the voltage and current directly off the stator.

If we’re doing the generator in a wind turbine we’re measuring the voltage and current directly off the stator. So if my transformer is uptower, that data has to come from uptower. If the data, if the transformer is downtower, say in a GE or some of the other machines, I can take that data downtower, which I prefer, to be perfectly honest.

But the idea is you go in you clamp on to three phases of current and three phases of voltage for optimal voltage. analysis. Really, if I’m just analyzing the components, I just need one good phase, right? One, one sinusoidal phase. There’s a lot of things that happen electrically in a machine, in a wind turbine, that are odd as compared to other types of generators.

So we have to work with that. And of course, whether I’m looking at a DFIG I like to call certain designs S FIG. Where I don’t have a feed to the rotor, I just have a switching system, such as in the old Suzlons. Or whether it’s an induction machine or a permanent magnet machine, each one is handled just a little differently, although the signatures are the same.

Allen Hall: So you’re measuring three voltages, three currents. On those signals is the power that’s coming from the generator, basically. But there’s other things on top of that. What electrical signals are on top of that, those power signals?

Howard Penrose: Every movement, every torsional issue, every component from the transformer to the blades.

In a defig even in some of the newer ones and one or two older designs that have the dual planetary gear set. We just added this as a matter of fact, in American clean power, we just add the, into the gearbox playbook, electrical signature analysis is one of the prognostics for the gearbox.

Through the air gap, we get to see. The transformer, we get to see all of the components in the generator that includes the bearings the Y rings and the rotor, which that’s, I think that’s one of the most popular reasons that were used is to define fracturing Y rings, and we’ll see those 14 months out.

And then even wedge issues of either vibrating or missing wedges in certain stator designs. Then we’ll see coupling issues. We’ll see all of the bearings in the gearbox, including the planetary bearings. We will see all the gears in the gearbox. I can’t tell you if it’s broken, cracked, or whatever, but I can tell you that there’s something wrong.

And not only that, I can tell you how much energy is being lost across that defect. And then the main bearings, we’ll even see when we have lubrication issues. One of the most common is when the lubrication is not changed out properly and you get dried grease at the bottom. We’ll read that as an outer race signature.

And then finally, if the blades aren’t aligned right, they don’t, they’re not turned correctly within a couple of degrees. We will see that as a blade pass as the impulse as it, as each blade passes the tower. You’ll see that variation, which can get tricky because certain designs now start to turn the blade a little bit based upon wind gusts and what LIDAR picks up coming at the wind tower.

Just by the way, what we didn’t include is the fact that I’m the chair of standards for ACP for wind. In the United States. So yeah, I have a little idea of what’s going on with the turbines.

Allen Hall: Just a tiny bit. Now, let me give a little, just talk about your background just for a second here, because I think it’s important.

You’re you started in the Navy. You’re from, originally from Canada, right? You came to the States and then you enlisted in the Navy.

Howard Penrose: I’m dual. So I was born in Michigan while my dad was finishing his doctorate at University of Michigan. Then he headed up the fisheries department in St.

John’s, Newfoundland, which makes me an official Newfie. So I joined the Navy. My worst class in A school was electric motors and generators. So I decided it was going to be my best subject. As I was one of the first hundred on board the Theodore Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier, and they said, what do you want to do?

And I said, I want motors. And generators. I was a a conventional electrician, not a nuclear power electrician. So they put me down there and, um, basically being one of the first hundred, I knew everybody. As a matter of fact, the nickname MotorDoc came from the captain of the ship back when I was 19 years old.

He authorized me to become the youngest electric motor repair journeyman in the Navy ever. I think to this day, so you have to sign up for six more years to get it. I didn’t have to I went to motor rewind school. I went to all the theoretical schools. I was enlisted. I got meritoriously advanced through E5 by the time I was 20.

So I spent two years in a chief’s position running a motor repair shop as a journeyman on an aircraft carrier.

Allen Hall: It takes a person like you that has the hand on hands on experience. Plus, a little bit of book knowledge, plus some education, and then have that kind of percolate for several years to go, okay, there is something to electrical signature analysis, and it’s real and to decode it.

I think that’s the hardest part, is decoding what’s there.

Howard Penrose: That, that is exactly the most challenging part, and the part, and the reason why most companies that have attempted to do it have failed is two parts. One is they’re trying to do it with current signature. I’m sorry, but a generator does not produce current.

It produces voltage. Wind is definitely different in that it’s both. There’s times when it acts because of the rotor, it’ll act as a load, times when it’ll act as a generator. And then with all of the controls for VAR correction, voltage correction, things like that. It will do different.

Wild things. The good news is I don’t care. What I do care about is that is that, for those who attempted the technology, not understanding that the technology measures the speed of the magnetic field, not the physical speed of the rotor. I don’t care. So if I’m a vibration analyst, I need feedback as to how fast the rotor is turning.

If I’m doing electrical signature, I need to know how fast the field is turning. Because in order to, in a defig, to get 60 hertz out, my field, if it’s a six pole machine, which a majority are six pole, others are four pole, that’ll be 1200 or 1800 rpm. If it’s a, if it’s a 1200 rpm, it’s going to be running slightly over 1200 rpm, which is why you don’t get exactly 60 hertz, right?

Because if you ran it exactly, then it becomes unstable, so you have to have it, yeah, you have to have it over speed just a little bit. That 1200 RPM motor, I’m just, I’m actually working on 320 turbines before we got on the call. The actual physical speed might hit as high as 1500 RPM, right? But if it did, and I didn’t compensate for that speed, I would have something like 80 Hertz.

Okay. Yeah, coming off, and it would fly all over the place. Then I would have to control it. But one of the, one of the, magical bits about D Fig is the VFD that runs in parallel and feeds the rotor changes either if it falls under that 1, 200 RPM, speeds it up, and if it’s over, slows it down.

One of the things we had discovered because of industrial work in active front end drives, which don’t have a DC bus, we can read through it. A motor that’s running at 35 hertz, on the incoming side, we discovered that all the signatures would be as if it were running at 60 hertz. If it was running as if it was on just a regular power source.

So I applied that to electrical signature. I applied that with electrical signature analysis to wind turbines. And suddenly we were seeing everything.

Allen Hall: So with that, you can see a lot of. noise or frequencies inside of that. You sampled it high enough now that you can start investigating, look inside of that data and you don’t need a lot of data.

You don’t need a lot of time. You don’t have to sit there and analyze data for hours. One set of data. Exactly. And that’s part of the key.

Howard Penrose: Now, this is a rules based system, right? Now we will, if we’re doing continuous monitoring, because we have that capability and we’re working on a capability with some of the OEMs to be able to just take data right from their towers, so we don’t have to have hardware.

to do the analysis. But we need a sample rate of a minimum of 10 kilohertz in order to be able to separate things out. And when we fall below that, the load has to be way up on the machine. The prognostic machines that are at that take data at 7, 500 hertz or less, they have to have wind speeds of at least 10 meters per second to be able to see anything.

We’re seeing it right at cut it. Which is bad. really interesting.

Allen Hall: A lot of machines take data faster than that. 15 kilohertz is what I’m here. Some of them are doing at the minute. So there’s enough data there.

Howard Penrose: But when they do 1500 kilohertz, they had, they only have very small data sets. So they switched that frequency so that we can get a longer data set.

The length of time combined with that that sampling rate is what gives us the resolution. And then because we’re doing 12 kHz, that also gives us a 6 kHz FMAX. That means we can see out to 360, 000 CPM. And most everything on a wind turbine happens under 3, 000 Hz.

Allen Hall: Oh, easy. Yeah. So that’s, and there’s your magic, right?

Now you’ve sampled the data fast enough and long enough to analyze essentially anything that’s happening on the wind turbine. What you’re measuring voltage wise and current wise all that data comes in. You then, I’m going to use some fancy terminology and I promised myself I wasn’t going to do this, but here we go.

They basically take a Fourier transform, right? So you’re looking at it in the frequency spectrum versus the time spectrum. And what that does, you start looking at rotating machines. They’ll start having peaks at certain frequencies based upon the mechanical principles in which they were designed. And then Howard, you come in and go.

That is a bearing, or a gearbox, right?

Howard Penrose: Yeah, and the nice thing is, the formulas are exactly the same. The multipliers for a bearing are the same as what I’d use in vibration. For instance, our technology we have a library of bearings in there with everything preset, so I don’t have to sit there and calculate out all the angles and number of balls and what the cage looks like and all that other crazy stuff that we learned in, in vibration school I just pull it out of a, out of a thing and the same thing that you do for, the multiplier time one RPM is the same multiplier times one Hertz.

Yeah, so we, you get the one time multiplier and you plug it in and you can identify inner race, outer race, ball, or cage. The nice thing about ESA is I don’t get harmonics. I just look at the one time. For that value, just like if I have a rotor related issue, like for instance, somebody asked me, could I detect a failing Y ring with vibration?

I said, absolutely. But you don’t have the bandwidth to do it. It would take too much memory because you would have to look out at four times the four times the. Slot frequency for the rotor, for certain aspects of the failure. Yeah, you’d have to in vibration. You might get lucky and see some pole pass frequency sidebands, which are twice the slip frequency.

But that would be mechanically related versus electrically related. So that’s going to constantly vary.

Allen Hall: So let’s talk about the wiring for a moment. So a wiring is, from simplistic terms, is how a connection internal to a motor that makes the thing spin.

Howard Penrose: Wound rotor generator.

Most wound rotor motors just have a connection made. they don’t have a ring. So in, in defigs, they normally have an actual ring like a hoop, and that goes around, and then they’ll have tabs that connect into it. Some will have direct connections. We’re working on some of those now. But what we discovered first off, we were asked by Chris Petrola from Axiona, and he did a whole presentation on this.

So I dare throw him into the weeds. He’s now with the now and he’ll appreciate it. But he had us go up to Calgary. He called me one day and I happened to be when he called on an overhead crane and a steel bell testing a wound rotor motor for failing slip rims. So we were testing, while everything’s moving, we’re over the pit of steel, a hundred feet up, staring down into molten, whatever, and he calls.

Of course, he called, so I had to answer. And he goes Hey, have you ever detected failing connections in the rotor of a defig generator? And I go, No, but I have a theory . So we go, we went up to Calgary to an to an Axion site, tested 40 turbines. He produced this at awe at the time, now a CP in 2018.

Because we did it in 2016, and then the repair shop out of Quebec went there Dallon, went there and and replaced the Y rings and took pictures of all of them. Now, of the 40 turbines, we detected 20 of them with fractured Y rings, and one, I said, I had a questionable reading. And that turned out to be a partial fracture.

They detected this, and then one year later, after we had detected them, Wind through the machines and pulled out the Y rings and replaced them up tower.

Allen Hall: Okay, so this is the key here. So not only are you able to detect problems in mechanical equipment and electrical equipment, for that matter, early, and diagnose, like, where it is health wise, it can be done so quickly, you can do most of a farm in a day.

Howard Penrose: So from 2017 to present, and wind is only about 20 percent of our work. I personally have been on over 4, 000 turbines collecting data, mostly in the US, some Canada. However, the technology is being used right now heavily in Brazil, Mexico, Canada, US. Asia and just a little bit right now in Europe, definitely in the Middle East too.

Allen Hall: Sure. Anywhere there’s a motor or a generator, you’re there.

Howard Penrose: I’m just talking about wind turbines. As far as the technology goes, it’s being used globally. The Empath system is one of the best kept secrets out there. We’re replacing vibration equipment in the industrial side, all over the place.

Monday, I’m dropping off. enough to for Reynolds aluminum to finish replacing all their vibration equipment with over 400 of our systems.

Allen Hall: Okay. See, this is where I first ran across you. I was on a wind site talking to a site manager. And I was saying, Hey, what’s cool. What’s the cool thing you’ve seen?

And the response back was, have you seen MotorDoc? Those, that equipment came in and they diagnosed every motor generator problem, gearbox problem, bearing problem. We had on each of the turbines and a couple of minutes, literally a couple of minutes, and we started to dig. We thought okay. Maybe? So we dug into them and they were 100 percent right.

Howard Penrose: I like hearing 100%. I usually tell people 85 to 90%. Even though the EPRI study that was done, looking at the technology and Empath was top. We were seen as well over 90. Closer to 95%.

Allen Hall: I think if you guys is one of the, I don’t know, one of the best kept secret, cause you’re not a secret. You’re out there doing tremendous work and OEMs know of you, operators, some operators know you very well.

Howard Penrose: OEMs, Almost all of the OEMs use us, meaning have, they have our equipment but we don’t put the names of our customers on our website to brag. We’ve actually been word of mouth for, 10 years. Really? I’ve been using the technology on wind. For over 20, since I think 2003 was my first set of towers in the Mojave desert

Allen Hall: But that’s that’s an amazing piece to this I think your story Is that you’ve done your homework and you’ve been in industry a long time you understand The physics i’ll call it associated with wind turbines motors generators that electrical machines that then You can then used to happen 40, 50 years ago, when I was a kid that those people were around all the time.

You could walk into a motor or a winding shop and people knew how these things worked and we’ve lost some of that. So you’re the part of that architecture of your, that kind of carryover into, hey we already know this stuff. Now we just need to apply some common sense to it and use it to our advantage, which is what you’ve done.

Howard Penrose: Yeah and we continue to do it. People go why aren’t you worrying about how many you sell? It’s I have no overheads. I don’t have a hundred people that I have to pay. I just, there’s only a handful of us. And with all the systems we have in the field what we do is we work ourselves out of work by building all the rules into the software.

We know that intrusive maintenance introduces faults. So everything we do, we try to do as non intrusively as possible.

Allen Hall: This is why you’re on the podcast, because I want to make sure that the select portion of the world that doesn’t know you exist then finds you. Because it’s a quick diagnostic tool, and that’s, and that was the input I got from the O& M people.

People operation maintenance people is that it’s a huge help. It’s such a simple device. They plug in you get the data it analyzes it doesn’t take a lot of Hand holding there Usually as soon as the data pops up it tells you exactly what it sees Right and you always have Howard to call if you get confused, but basically that thing tells you what’s wrong Quickly, and then you can go debug your turbine, or at least have a health status on your turbine, a real health status on your turbine without a lot of work.

That’s genius.

Howard Penrose: It reduces the wear and tear on the technician, right? They’re not climbing to to do other things. One of my good friends now from, the engineer from from H& N, Hank he got up and he explained how boroscope testing for the detection of the wiring issue is only about 50 to 60 percent accurate because you’re looking to see if something’s broken, like the insulation is broken, plus you can’t see the tabs and everything else.

We’re seeing partial fractures long before that occurs. And like I said, Up to 12 to 14 months out. So I’ll usually give it an A through F. Nobody gets an A, but a B through F I’m a horrible professor, but no, no waiting. Those grades. No, B just means continue monitoring. I don’t want people to not check because we have seen like Brazil they’re now just so you’re aware of the wiring issue and everything else.

We were the ones who discovered that was, along with Shermco and H& N, it was a joint project that it was actually fatigue, it’s not a problem with the design of the wiring. It has to do with a a subsynchronous resonance that exists on the grid. So the windings are constantly moving. They’re constantly flexing ring.

Shermco had taken sections of a ring and had a metallurgist look at it. And we could see all of the fatigue points.

Allen Hall: People don’t think of electric machines having fatigue, right? They just think them as just a bunch of coppers spinning around.

Howard Penrose: Everybody since the dawn of time thought that all of these mechanical issues were strictly mechanical.

And we’re finding that there’s electrical reasons for a lot of the mechanical conditions and there’s possible solutions to them. In fact, some of those solutions have already been worked on. But not for this reason.

Allen Hall: And that’s what I think that’s the point, right? Is that we’re in some measure, we have old technology, proven technology, but we’re changing it drastically in the way that we feed it.

Howard Penrose: From both directions, it’s not just the power generation, but we spend a lot of time on in the industrial side is what the heck they’re putting back in the system and utilities, we’ll go in, we’ll see these horrible harmonic conditions in power. ground and neutral. And we’re trying to correct it and the utilities are all going we don’t care about that.

It means nothing. We don’t bill on that. No joke. It’s wait a minute, this is actually consuming a ton of energy. Plus it’s really dumping a lot of garbage back into the system that works its way all the way back because While the transformers and certain filters take some of it out, I can go onto the bulk grid and see some of those oscillations.

Allen Hall: And that’s if you’re a wind turbine operator and you’re living with these conditions, you wouldn’t, your first thought is there’s something wrong with the OEM equipment that I purchased. I need to go debug this thing. But the mere fact that it’s connected to the grid may be driving the problem on the turbine.

And we don’t think about it that way. We think about turbine out, not grid in.

Howard Penrose: Yeah. And then a combination of, Some of the sites will do VAR correction or voltage correction and they’ll be correcting for their site next door. You know what I mean? So one site won’t be doing it, the other site will depending on the controls.

And you find that one side or the other has a higher rate of failure of all their components because of the oscillation that occurs as a direct result.

Allen Hall: Create a tank circuit. Yeah. But those, again this is, as we were talking about earlier the number of electrical engineers on staff at some of these operators is like a 1%, maybe?

2 percent of the staff? 2 percent if you’re lucky. Which there are electrical machines. That’s what they do. We need to have, we need to be a little bit I don’t want to say smarter about it, but we have tools. And this is where Empath come in and where you come in and MotorDoc comes in, you have the tools.

They’re here.

Howard Penrose: And what’s really funny about it is it’s mechanical types like vibration analysts and mechanical engineers that understand the signature they’re looking at. But they hear electrical signature analysis and all of a sudden everybody’s afraid. Or they go, oh no, that’s an electrical issue, that’s for the electricians.

No, actually, the technology was originally developed to look for bearing and gear issues in motor operated valves in the nuclear power industry. It was never meant to look at rotors. It was never meant to look at all this other stuff. It was just incidental that it did it. And, um, it’s, what’s, it’s, what’s fascinating about, the technology and its application.

Allen Hall: It’s wonderful. It’s wonderful. And for those who haven’t seen the system, how do they get onto your website? How do they find you?

Howard Penrose: They can, they can go straight. The easiest way to go is motordoc. com motordoc.com and then they can go to EmpathCMS which i have some videos of wind turbine stuff or MotorDoc ai where i have a little you know podcast of maybe 50 people if i’m lucky where i talk about a lot of this and show how it works and so on so i’m trying to get the information out i published a book on it Practical Electrical and Current Signature Analysis of Electric Machinery and Systems, which includes a chapter on wind turbines.

Allen Hall: I really appreciate you being on this podcast. I like talking to electrical people that are knowledgeable and have had experience in industry for a long time because you’re such a huge resource to everybody and we need to be using you more than we probably are. But, and it’s good to get the word out, right?

Because there’s some parts of the world and some parts of America that may not have heard of you. So let’s get the word out. Hey, go check out Motordoc and get ahold of Howard because he’s a resource. Howard, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Howard Penrose: Absolutely. Thank you.

https://weatherguardwind.com/empathcms-fast-fault-detection-wind-turbines/

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Renewable Energy

How Is U.S. Insanity Affecting Tourism?

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It’s probably a bit too soon to have useable statistics on this subject, but it’s certainly not too early to apply some common sense.

There are at two factors at play here:

1) America is broadly regarded as a rogue country.  Do you want to visit North Korea? Do Canadians want to spend money in a country that wants to annex them?

2) America is now understood to be unsafe.  Do you want to visit Palestine? Ukraine? Iran?

How Is U.S. Insanity Affecting Tourism?

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Renewable Energy

Commercial Solar Solutions: Real Case Studies by Cyanergy

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Instead of reacting to the next power bill shock, many Australian businesses are starting to think forward.

Every day, more and more Australian companies are asking a simple question we all seek an answer to: How can we reduce energy costs without compromising performance?

Well, for many, the answer lies in commercial solar power, and Cyanergy is one of the Australian companies helping businesses take that step with confidence.

With hands-on experience delivering commercial solar solutions across a wide range of industries, from farms and sporting clubs to breweries and large manufacturing facilities, Cyanergy’s real-world projects demonstrate how tailored solar systems can transform energy usage and significantly reduce operating expenses.

In this blog, we’ll explore what commercial solar power is, why it matters today, and how Cyanergy’s real-world case studies illuminate the path to a cleaner, more profitable energy future, both financially and environmentally

Let’s get into it!

What Are Commercial Solar Solutions? |Why does this matter?

Solar solutions for commercial applications are photovoltaic (PV) systems designed to meet the energy needs of businesses, large facilities, and organizations. This system often consumes much more power than residential households.

Commercial solar systems typically include:

  • Solar PV panels that capture sunlight and convert it to electricity
  • Inverters and electrical integration are used to convert DC to usable AC power
  • Monitoring and performance systems are installed to track energy generation
  • Optional battery storage to support energy autonomy and peak demand management

Unlike residential solar, commercial systems are scaled to handle larger loads and are often optimized for financial return, corporate sustainability goals, and energy independence.

Why Australian Businesses Are Turning to Solar Now?

Throughout the world, many companies are adopting solar power for several compelling reasons. It is already proven
that solar can:

  1. Reduce Operational Costs
  2. Electricity prices are volatile and often increasing worldwide. Incorporating a solar panel helps businesses lock
    in
    energy cost savings by
    producing electricity on-site rather than relying exclusively on grid power.

  3. Strong Financial Returns
  4. Commercial solar systems can pay back their investment in just a few years, far shorter than the 25 to 30 years
    the
    panels last. This ultimately means, after that, you are left with decades of essentially free electricity.

  5. Sustainability and Brand Value
  6. Customers, employees, and stakeholders increasingly value organizations that visibly commit to environmental
    responsibility.

  7. Energy Security
  8. Generating power locally reduces reliance on external sources and grid outages, a huge advantage for businesses
    with
    continuous operations.

    This mix of economic, environmental, and operational benefits makes commercial solar a smart choice for
    forward-looking organizations and commercial
    property
    owners
    .

4 Proven Solutions Through Real Case Studies by Cyanergy

To understand how these benefits play out in real situations, let’s dive into several commercial solar projects executed by Cyanergy. These case studies show diverse applications of solar power and tangible outcomes for different kinds of businesses.

1. Kew Golf Club (VIC): Sporting Facility Goes Solar

At a local golf club that relied on consistent electricity for lighting, clubhouse operations, and course facilities, Cyanergy installed an 88 kW commercial solar system to reduce costs.

Key Results

  • Payback period: around 63 months (5 years)
  • Annual savings: $26,165, a 50% drop in electricity costs
  • Energy generated per year: 141 MWh

This project demonstrates that not only industrial property but also community-oriented facilities can benefit greatly from solar power.

Beyond cost savings, the golf club also reinforced its commitment to sustainability, attracting eco-conscious members and reducing its carbon footprint.

Why This Matters?

Solar is not limited to manufacturing or heavy industry. In Australia, many Sports clubs, community centres, and similar facilities often have high energy use during peak daylight hours, which can be supported by solar.

2. Sparacino Farms: Where Agriculture Meets Solar Innovation!

Whether for irrigation, cooling, processing, or storage, agricultural operations have faced rising energy costs for a long time.

Similarly, Sparacino Farm was suffering from high electricity costs. For this family-run farm, Cyanergy implemented a 99.76 kW solar system that revolutionised their energy expenses.

Project Highlights

  • Electricity cost dropped: from $48,000 to $12,000 per year
  • Monthly savings: roughly $3,000
  • Payback period: 30 months (2.5 years)
  • Annual clean energy production: 87 MWh

This dramatic turnaround showcases how rural and agricultural businesses can achieve some of the fastest returns on solar investments.

In environments where a roof, sunlight, or a shed space is available, solar becomes both a strategic and practical choice.

The Sparacino farms example proves that solar isn’t just an environmental sustainability, it’s a core business decision that can significantly improve margins.

3. Philter Brewing: Crafting Sustainability

Sustainability often aligns naturally with brand identity, and for Philter Brewing, this was a perfect match.

With the help of Cyanergy, the brand installed an 86 kW system to slash power costs and support green operations.

Project Impact

  • Annual energy generated: 99 MWh
  • Annual savings: $29,130, cutting electricity costs from $81,900 to $52,770
  • Payback period: 45 months (3.75 years)

The brewery not only reduced operating expenses but also strengthened its reputation as an environmentally conscious brand, a powerful differentiator in a competitive market.

4. Uniplas Mouldings International: Heavy Industry Solar Success

In one of Cyanergy’s most impactful case studies, a large industrial manufacturer significantly transformed its energy profile with solar. And that’s Uniplas Mouldings International!

Project Features

  • Total installed solar: 490 kW, executed in staged phases
  • Timeline: Stage 1 (200 kW) completed in just 4 weeks
  • Subsidy optimisation: Accessed three sets of government incentives
  • Payback period: as short as 37 months
  • Annual generation: 752 MWh
  • Energy cost savings: Lowered from $647,000 to $456,000 per year

Big industrial energy users can unlock dramatic operational savings with solar, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year while achieving rapid ROI that justifies investment sooner, without delay.

Beyond Case Studies: Cyanergy’s Approach to Commercial Solar

Across all these projects, Cyanergy’s methodology shares some common themes that contribute to success:

1. Customized System Design

We all know that no two energy profiles are identical, whether it’s a golf club or a manufacturing plant.

At Cyanergy, we design systems tailored to the business’s actual energy usage, site orientation, and financial goals. So you don’t have to worry about adding a solar solution.

2. Financial Optimization

From government incentives to financial investment planning, Cyanergy helps businesses structure their solar projects to reduce upfront costs and improve payback timelines.

3. End-to-End After-Sale Support

Proper solar implementation requires more than panels; it requires site assessment, design, installation coordination, monitoring, and performance guarantee.

At Cyanergy, we support clients at every step, from early energy audits to post-installation support.

4. Monitoring and Reporting

Tracking system performance and energy generation ensures ongoing optimization and confidence in the investment.

Our real-time monitoring tools empower business owners to understand exactly how solar contributes to their bottom line.

The Transformative Role of Solar in Business Strategy

The benefits of commercial solar extend far beyond the energy generated or the energy cost that’s reduced. Overall, solar is a strategic business asset that impacts:

Profitability: Lower operating costs mean more available working capital, whether for reinvestment, dividends, or growth initiatives.

Resilience: Energy independence provides a hedge against market volatility in electricity pricing.

Sustainability Credentials: Solar investments signal that your organization is serious about environmental stewardship, which is crucial to investors, customers, and regulators alike.

Employee and Community Engagement: A company that commits to clean energy signals a long-term vision, strengthening morale and community trust.

Takeaway Thoughts

Cyanergy’s real case studies show how businesses from farms to breweries to industrial giants have harnessed solar to cut costs, stabilize operations, and enhance sustainability.

Whether your organization is exploring its first solar project or looking to scale existing efforts, the data is clear: smart solar investment delivers measurable ROI and long-term value.

As energy dynamics continue to evolve, solar power will become increasingly relevant, and companies that act now will secure economic and environmental advantages for years to come.

So, it’s time for you to take the next move! For more information, contact us today and win a free solar quote!

Your Solution Is Just a Click Away

The post Commercial Solar Solutions: Real Case Studies by Cyanergy appeared first on Cyanergy.

https://cyanergy.com.au/blog/commercial-solar-solutions-real-case-studies-by-cyanergy/

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Inside ATT and SSE’s Faskally Safety Leadership Centre

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Inside ATT and SSE’s Faskally Safety Leadership Centre

Allen visits the Faskally Safety Leadership Centre with Mark Patterson, Director of Safety, Health, and Environment at SSE, and Dermot Kerrigan, Director and Co-Founder of Active Training Team. They discuss how SSE has put over 9,000 employees and 2,000 contract partners through ATT’s innovative training program, which uses actors and realistic scenarios to create lasting behavioral change across the entire workforce chain, from executives to technicians. Reach out to SSE and ATT to learn more!

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow.

Allen Hall: Mark and Turnt. Welcome to the show. Thank you.

Mark Patterson: Thank you.

Allen Hall: We’re in Scotland, present Scotland and per Scotland, which is a place most people probably haven’t ventured to in the United States, but it is quite lovely, although chilly and rainy. It’s Scotland. We’re in December. Uh, and we’re here to take a look at the SSE Training Center.

And the remarkable things that active training team is doing here, because we had seen this in Boston in a smaller format, uh, about a year ago almost now.

Dermot Kerrigan: Just Yeah,

Allen Hall: yeah. Six months

Dermot Kerrigan: ago.

Allen Hall: Yeah. Yeah. It hasn’t been that long ago. Uh, but IC was on me to say, you gotta come over. You gotta come over. You gotta see the, the whole, uh, environment where we put you into the police room and some of the things we wanna talk about, uh, because it, [00:01:00] it does play different.

And you’re right, it does play different. It is very impactful. And it, and maybe we should start off first of Mark, you’re the head of basically health and safety and environment for SSE here in Perth. This is a remarkable facility. It is unlike anything I have seen in the States by far. And SSE has made the commitment to do this sort of training for.

Everybody in your employment and outside of your employment, even contractors.

Mark Patterson: We have been looking at some quite basic things in safety as everybody does. And there’s a fundamental thing we want to do is get everybody home safe. And uh, it’s easier said than done because you’ve gotta get it right for every single task, every single day.

And that’s a massive challenge. And we have like 15,000. 15,000 people in SSE, we probably work with about 50,000 contract [00:02:00] partners and we’re heavily dependent, uh, on get our contract partners to get our activities done. And they’re crucial.

Speaker: Mm-hmm.

Mark Patterson: And in that it’s one community and we need to make sure everybody there gets home safe.

And that’s what drove us to think about adding more rules isn’t gonna do it. Um, you need to give people that sense of a feeling, uh, when a really serious sense of cars and then equip them with tools to, to deal with it. So. We’ve all probably seen training that gives that sense of doom and dread when something goes badly wrong, but actually that needs to be.

Coupled with something which is quite powerful, is what are the tools that help people have the conversations that gets everybody home safe. So kind of trying to do two things.

Allen Hall: Well, SSC is involved in a number of large projects. You have three offshore wind farms, about a more than a thousand turbines right now.

Wind turbines onshore, offshore, and those offshore projects are not easy. There’s a lot of complexity to them.

Mark Patterson: Absolutely. So look, I I think [00:03:00] that’s, that’s something that. You’ve gotta partner with the right people. If you wanna be successful, you need to make it easy for people to do the right thing. Yeah, as best you possibly can.

You need to partner with the right people, and you need to get people that you need to have a sense that you need to keep checking that as you’re growing your business. The chinks in your armor don’t grow too. But fundamentally there’s something else, which is a sense of community. When people come together to, to do a task, there is a sense of community and people work, put a lot of discretionary effort into to get, uh, big projects done.

And in that, um, it’s a sense of community and you wanna make sure everybody there gets home safe to their friends and family. ’cause if we’re all being honest about it, you know, SSE is a brilliant company. What we do is absolutely worth doing. I love SC. But I love my family a fair amount more. And if you bought into that, you probably bought into the strategy that we’re trying to adopt in terms of safety.

Uh, it’s really simple messaging. Um,

Allen Hall: yeah. That, that is very clear. Yeah. And it should be [00:04:00]well communicated outside of SSEI hope because it is a tremendous, uh, value to SSE to do that. And I’m sure the employees appreciate it because you have a culture of safety. What. Trigger that. How long ago was that trigger?

Is this, this is not something you thought up yesterday for sure.

Mark Patterson: No, look, this, the, the, what we’ve done in the immersive training center, um, really reinforces a lot of things that we’ve had in place for a while, and it, it takes it to the, the next level. So we’ve been working probably more than 10 years, but, uh, certainly the.

Seven years we’ve been talking very much about our safety family, that’s the community and SSE with our contract partners and what we need to do. And part of that is really clear language about getting people home safe. Uh, a sense that you’ve, everybody in it that works with us has a safety license. And that license is, if it’s not safe, we don’t do it.

It’s not a rural based thing. It’s how we roll. It’s part of the culture. We’d, we, uh, have a culture where, and certainly trying to instill for everybody a culture. Where [00:05:00] they’ve got that license. If, if they think something’s not right, we’ll stop the job and get it right. And even if they’re wrong, we’ll still listen to them because ultimately we need to work our way through, right?

So we’ve been, we’ve thought hard about the language we wanted to use to reinforce that. So the importance of plan, scan and adapt. So planning our work well, thinking through what we need to do. Not just stopping there though, keeping scanning for what could go wrong. That sense that you can’t remember everything.

So you need to have immediate corrective actions and that immediate sort of see it, sort of report it. If you see something that isn’t right, do something about it. And that sense of community caring for the community that you work with. And those are the essence of our, our language on safety and the immersive training.

Uh, is not trying to shove that language down everybody’s throats again, particularly our contract partners, but it’s, it’s helping people see some really clear things. One is if a [00:06:00] really serious incident occurs at what, what it feels like here. And I’ve spent a lot of time in various industries and people are different when they’ve been on a site or involved when there’s been a really serious incident and you need to do something to.

Get that sense of a feeling of what it feels like and actually make people feel slightly uncomfortable in the process. ’cause that’s part of it,

Allen Hall: right? Yes.

Mark Patterson: Because you know,

Allen Hall: you remember that.

Mark Patterson: You remember that. Yeah. We’ve had, you know, we’ve had people say, well, I felt very uncomfortable in that bit of the training.

It was okay. But was, I felt very uncomfortable. And you know, we’ve talked about that a lot.

Allen Hall: Yeah.

Mark Patterson: We know you kinda should because if there’s something wrong with you, if you don’t feel uncomfortable about that. But what’s super powerful on the guys in at TT do brilliantly. Is have facilitators that allow you to have that conversation and understand what do you need to do differently?

How do you influence somebody who’s more senior? How do you, how do you bring people with you so that they’re gonna [00:07:00] do what you want ’em to do after you’ve left the building? And. Just pointing the finger at people and shouting at them. Never does that. Right? Uh, rarely does that. You’ve gotta get that sense of how do you get people to have a common belief?

And,

Allen Hall: and I think that’s important in the way that SSE addresses that, is that you’re not just addressing technicians, it’s the whole chain. It’s everybody is involved in this action. And you can break the link anywhere in there. I wanna get through the description of why that. Process went through ATTs head to go.

We need to broaden the scope a little bit. We need to think about the full chain from the lowest entry worker just getting started to the career senior executive. Why chain them all together? Why put them in the same room together? Yeah. Why do you do that?

Dermot Kerrigan: Well, behavioral safety or behavioral base safety kind of got a bad rep because it was all about.

If we could just [00:08:00] make those guys at the front line behave themselves,

Allen Hall: then everything’s fine,

Dermot Kerrigan: then everything’s fine.

Allen Hall: Yes.

Dermot Kerrigan: But actually that’s kind of a, the wrong way of thinking. It didn’t work. I, I think,

Allen Hall: yeah, it didn’t work.

Dermot Kerrigan: What the mess, the central message we’re trying to get across is that actually operational safety is not just the business of operational people.

It’s everybody’s business.

Allen Hall: Right.

Dermot Kerrigan: You know? Um, and. Yeah, everybody has a role to p play in that, you know? Right. So site based teams, back office support functions, everybody has a role to play. And, you know, there’s a strand in, in this scenario where, uh, an incident takes place because people haven’t been issued with the right piece of equipment.

Which is a lifting cage.

Allen Hall: Yes.

Dermot Kerrigan: And there’s a whole story about that, which goes through a procurement decision made somewhere where somebody hit a computer and a computer said no because they’d asked for too many lifting cages when they, somebody could have said, you’ve asked for five lifting cages, it’s takes you over the procurement cap.

Would four do it? [00:09:00] Yes, that would be fine. That would be fine. Yeah. As it is, they come to a crucial piece of operation. This incr this, you know, this crucial piece of kit simply isn’t there. So in order to hit the deadline and try and make people happy, two ordinary guys, two technicians, put two and two together, make five, and, and one of them gets killed, you know?

Yeah. So it’s, we’re, we’re trying to show that, that this isn’t just operational people. It’s everybody’s business.

Mark Patterson: Well, that’s why we worked with you in this, because, um, we saw. Why you got it in terms of that chain? Um, so in, in the scenario, it’s very clear there’s a senior exec talking to the client and actually as SSE.

We’re sometimes that client, we’ve got big principal contractors that are doing our big construction activities. We’ve got a lot in renewables and onshore and offshore wind obviously, but, and the transmission business and in thermal, so, uh, and distribution. So I’ll list all our businesses and including customer’s business, but we’ve got some big project activities where we’re the client sometime we’re the principal contractor [00:10:00] ourselves.

And we need to recognize that in each chain, each link in that chain, there’s a risk that we say the wrong thing, put the wrong pressure on. And I think what’s really helpful is we have in the center that sort of philosophy here that we get everybody in together mixed up. Probably at least half of our board have done this.

Our executive team have all done this. Um, people are committed to it at that level, and they’re here like everybody else sitting, waiting for this thing to start. Not being quite sure what they’re gonna go through in the day. Um, and it’s actually really important you’ve got a chief exec sitting with somebody who’s, um, a scaffolder.

That’s really important. ’cause the scaffolder is probably the more likely person to get hurt rather than chief exec. So actually everybody seeing what it’s like and the pressures that are under at each level is really important.

Allen Hall: SSC is such a good example for the industry. I watched you from outside in America for a long time and you just watch the things that happened.

[00:11:00] Here you go. Wow. Okay. SSC is organized. They know what they’re doing, they understand what the project is, they’re going about it. Mm-hmm. Nothing is perfect, but I, I think when we watch from the United States, we see, oh, there’s order to it. There’s a reason they’re doing these things. They’re, they’re measuring what is happening.

And I think that’s one of the things about at t is the results. Have been remarkable, not just here, but in several different sites, because a TT touches a lot of massive infrastructure projects in the uk and the success rate has been tremendous. Remember? You wanna just briefly talk about that?

Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah. But we, we run a number of centers.

We also run mobile programs, which you got from having seen us in the States. Um, but the first, uh, center that we, we, we opened was, was called. Epic, which stood for Employers Project Induction Center, and that was the Thames Tideway Tunnel Project, which is now more or less finished. It’s completed. And that was a 10 year project, 5 billion pounds.

Allen Hall: Wow.

Dermot Kerrigan: Um, [00:12:00] and you know, unfortunately the fact is on, on that kind of project, you would normally expect to hurt a number of people, sometimes fatally. That would be the expectation.

Allen Hall: Right. It’s a complicated

Dermot Kerrigan: project, statistic underground. So, you know, we, and, and of course Tide, we are very, very. Very pleased that, uh, in that 10 year span, they didn’t even have one, uh, serious life-changing injury, uh, let alone a fatality.

Um, so you know that that’s, and I’m I’m not saying that what ATTs work, uh, what we do is, is, is, is directly responsible for that, but certainly Epic, they would say Tideway was the cornerstone for the safety practices, very good safety practices that they, they put out. Uh, on that project, again, as a cultural piece to do with great facilities, great leadership on the part of the, of the, of the executive teams, et cetera, and stability.

It was the same ex executive team throughout that whole project, which is quite unusual.

Allen Hall: No.

Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah. [00:13:00] Um, so yeah, it, it, it seems to work, you know, uh, always in safety that the, the, the, the tricky thing is trying to prove something works because it hasn’t happened. You know?

Allen Hall: Right, right. Uh, prove the negative.

Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah. Um,

Allen Hall: but in safety, that’s what you want to have happen. You, you do know, not want an outcome.

Dermot Kerrigan: No, absolutely not.

Allen Hall: No reports, nothing.

Dermot Kerrigan: No. So, you know, you have to give credit to, to organizations. Organizations like SSE. Oh, absolutely. And projects like Tideway and Sted, uh, on their horn projects. Who, who have gone down this, frankly, very left field, uh, route.

We we’re, you know, it is only in the last 10 years that we’ve been doing this kind of thing, and it hasn’t, I mean, you know, Tideway certainly is now showing some results. Sure. But, you know, it’s, it’s, it, it wasn’t by any means a proven way of, of, of dealing with safety. So

Mark Patterson: I don’t think you could ever prove it.

Dermot Kerrigan: No.

Mark Patterson: And actually there’s, there’s something [00:14:00]fundamentally of. It, it kind of puts a stamp on the culture that you want, either you talked about the projects in SSE, we’ve, we’ve done it for all of our operational activities, so we’ve had about 9,000 people through it for SSE and so far about 2000 contract partners.

Um, we’re absolutely shifting our focus now. We’ve got probably 80% of our operational teams have been through this in each one of our businesses, and, uh, we. We probably are kind of closing the gaps at the moment, so I was in Ireland with. I here guys last week, um, doing a, a mobile session because logistically it was kind of hard to come to Perth or to one of the other centers, but we’re, we’re gradually getting up to that 80%, uh, for SSE colleagues and our focus is shifting a bit more to contract partners and making sure they get through.

And look, they are super positive about this. Some of them have done that themselves and worked with a TT in the past, so they’re. Really keen to, to use the center that we have [00:15:00] here in Perth, uh, for their activities. So when, when they’re working with us, we kind of work together to, to make that happen. Um, but they can book that separately with you guys.

Yeah. Uh, in, in the, uh, Fastly Center too.

Allen Hall: I think we should describe the room that we’re in right now and why this was built. This is one of three different scenes that, that each of the. Students will go through to put some realism to the scenario and the scenario, uh, a worker gets killed. This is that worker’s home?

Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah. So each of the spaces that we have here that, that they denote antecedents or consequences, and this is very much consequences. Um, so the, the, the participants will be shown in here, uh, as they go around the center, uh, and there’s a scene that takes place where they meet the grown up daughter of the young fella who’s been right, who’s been, who’s been tragically killed.

Uh, and she basically asks him, uh, asks [00:16:00] them what happened. And kind of crucially this as a subtext, why didn’t you do something about it?

Allen Hall: Mm-hmm.

Dermot Kerrigan: Because you were there,

Allen Hall: you saw it, why it was played out in front of you. You saw, you

Dermot Kerrigan: saw what happened. You saw this guy who was obviously fast asleep in the canteen.

He was exhausted. Probably not fit for work. Um, and yet being instructed to go back out there and finish the job, um, with all the tragic consequences that happen,

Allen Hall: right?

Dermot Kerrigan: But it’s important to say, as Mark says, that. It’s not all doom and gloom. The first part of the day is all about showing them consequences.

Allen Hall: Sure. It’s

Dermot Kerrigan: saying it’s a,

Allen Hall: it’s a Greek tragedy

Dermot Kerrigan: in

Allen Hall: some

Dermot Kerrigan: ways, but then saying this doesn’t have to happen. If you just very subtly influence other people’s behavior, it’s

Allen Hall: slight

Dermot Kerrigan: by thinking about how you behave and sure adapting your behavior accordingly, you can completely change the outcome. Uh, so long as I can figure out where you are coming from and where that behavior is coming from, I might be able to influence it,

Allen Hall: right.

Dermot Kerrigan: And if I can, then I can stop that [00:17:00] hap from happening. And sure enough, at the end of the day, um, the last scene is that the, the, the daughter that we see in here growing up and then going back into this tragic, uh, ending, uh. She’s with her dad, then it turned out he was the one behind the camera all along.

So he’s 45 years old, she’s just passed the driving test and nobody got her 21 years ago. You know,

Mark Patterson: I think there, there is, there’s a journey that you’ve gotta take people through to get to believe that. And kind of part of that journey is as, as we look around this room, um, no matter who it is, and we’ve talked to a lot of people, they’ll be looking at things in this room and think, well, yeah, I’ve got a cup like that.

And yes. Yeah. When my kids were, we, we had. That play toy for the kids. Yes. So there is something that immediately hooks people and children hook

Allen Hall: people.

Mark Patterson: Absolutely. And

Allen Hall: yes,

Mark Patterson: they get to see that and understand that this is, this is, this is, could be a real thing. And also in the work site, uh, view, there’s kind of a work site, there’s a kind of a boardroom type thing [00:18:00] and you can actually see, yeah, that’s what it kind of feels like.

The work sites a little bit. You know, there’s scuffs in the, on the line, on the floor because that’s what happens in work sites and there’s a sense of realism for all of this, uh, is really important.

Allen Hall: The realism is all the way down to the outfits that everybody’s worn, so they’re not clean safety gear.

It’s. Dirty, worn safety gear, which is what it should be. ’cause if you’re working, that’s what it should look like. And it feels immediately real that the, the whole stage is set in a, in the canteen, I’ll call it, I don’t know, what do you call the welfare area? Yeah. Okay.

Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah.

Allen Hall: Okay. Uh, wanna use the right language here.

But, uh, in the states we call it a, a break room. Uh, so you’re sitting in the break room just minding your own business and boom. An actor walks in, in full safety gear, uh, speaking Scottish very quickly, foreign American. But it’s real.

Mark Patterson: I think

Allen Hall: it feels real because you, you, I’ve been in those situations, I’ve seen that that break the,

Mark Patterson: the language is real and, uh, [00:19:00] perhaps not all, uh, completely podcast suitable.

Um, but when you look at it, the feedback we’ve got from, from people who are closer to the tools and at all levels, in fact is, yeah. This feels real. It’s a credible scenario and uh, you get people who. I do not want to be in a safety training for an entire day. Um, and they’re saying arms folded at the start of the day and within a very short period of time, they are absolutely watching what the heck’s going on here.

Yes. To understand what’s happening, what’s going on. I don’t understand. And actually it’s exactly as you say, those subtle things that you, not just giving people that experience, but the subtle things you can nudge people on to. There’s some great examples of how do you nudge people, how do you give feedback?

And we had some real examples where people have come back to us and said even things to do with their home life. We were down in London one day, um, and I was sitting in on the training and one of the guys said, God, you’ve just taught me something about how I can give feedback to people in a really impactful [00:20:00] way.

So you, so you explain the behavior you see, which is just the truth of what the behavior is. This is what I saw you do, this is what happened, but actually the impact that that has. How that individual feels about it. And the example that they used was, it was something to do with their son and how their son was behaving and interacting.

And he said, do you know what? I’ve struggled to get my son to toe the line to, to look after his mom in the right way. I’m gonna stop on the way home and I’m gonna have a conversation with him. And I think if I. Keep yourself cool and calm and go through those steps. I think I can have a completely different conversation.

And that was a great example. Nothing to do with work, but it made a big difference to that guy. But all those work conversations where you could just subtly change your tone. Wind yourself back, stay cool and calm and do something slightly different. And I think that those, those things absolutely make a difference,

Allen Hall: which is hard to do in the moment.

I think that’s what the a TT training does make you think of the re the first reaction, [00:21:00] which is the impulsive reaction. We gotta get this job done. This has gotta be done. Now I don’t have the right safety gear. We’ll, we’ll just do it anyway to, alright, slow. Just take a breather for a second. Think about what the consequences of this is.

And is it worth it at the end of the day? Is it worth it? And I think that’s the, the reaction you want to draw out of people. But it’s hard to do that in a video presentation or

Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah.

Allen Hall: Those things just

Dermot Kerrigan: don’t need to practice.

Allen Hall: Yeah. It doesn’t stick in your brain.

Dermot Kerrigan: You need to give it a go And to see, right.

To see how to see it happen. And, and the actors are very good. They’re good if they, you know. What, whatever you give them, they will react to.

Mark Patterson: They do. That’s one of the really powerful things. You’ve got the incident itself, then you’ve got the UNP of what happened, and then you’ve got specific, uh, tools and techniques and what’s really good is.

Even people who are not wildly enthusiastic at the start of the day of getting, being interactive in, in, in a session, they do throw themselves into it ’cause they recognize they’ve been through [00:22:00] something. It’s a common sense of community in the room.

Dermot Kerrigan: Right.

Mark Patterson: And they have a bit of fun with it. And it is fun.

Yeah. You know, people say they enjoy the day. Um, they, they, they recognize that it’s challenged them a little bit and they kinda like that, but they also get the opportunity to test themselves. And that testing is really important in terms of, sure. Well, how do you challenge somebody you don’t know and you just walking past and you see something?

How do you have that conversation in a way that just gets to that adult To adult communication? Yeah. And actually gets the results that you need. And being high handed about it and saying, well, those are the rules, or, I’m really important, just do it. That doesn’t give us a sustained improvement.

Dermot Kerrigan: PE people are frightened of failure, you know?

Sure. They’re frightened of getting things wrong, so give ’em a space where they, where actually just fall flat in your face. Come back up again and try again. You know, give it a go. And, because no one’s, this is a safe space, you know, unlike in the real world,

Allen Hall: right?

Dermot Kerrigan: This is as near to the real world as you want to get.

It’s pretty real. It’s safe, you know, uh, it’s that Samuel Beckett thing, you know, fail again, [00:23:00] fail better,

Allen Hall: right?

Mark Patterson: But there’s, there’s a really good thing actually because people, when they practice that they realize. Yeah, it’s not straightforward going up and having a conversation with somebody about something they’re doing that could be done better.

And actually that helps in a way because it probably makes people a little bit more generous when somebody challenges them on how they’re approaching something. Even if somebody challenges you in a bit of a cat handed way, um, then you can just probably take a breath and think this. This, this guy’s probably just trying to have a conversation with me,

Allen Hall: right.

Mark Patterson: So that I get home to my family.

Allen Hall: Right.

Mark Patterson: It’s hard to get annoyed when you get that mindset. Mindset

Allen Hall: someone’s looking after you just a little bit. Yeah. It does feel nice.

Mark Patterson: And, and even if they’re not doing it in the best way, you need to be generous with it. So there’s, there’s good learnings actually from both sides of the, the, the interaction.

Allen Hall: So what’s next for SSE and at t? You’ve put so many people through this project in, in the program and it has. Drawn great results.

Mark Patterson: Yeah.

Allen Hall: [00:24:00] How do you, what do you think of next?

Mark Patterson: So what’s next? Yeah, I guess, uh, probably the best is next to come. Next to come. We, I think there’s a lot more that we can do with this.

So part of what we’ve done here is establish with a big community of people, a common sense of what we’re doing. And I think we’ve got an opportunity to continue with that. We’ve got, um, fortunate to be in a position where we’ve got a good level of growth in the business.

Allen Hall: Yes,

Mark Patterson: we do. Um, there’s a lot going on and so there’s always a flow of new people into an organization, and if people, you know, the theory of this stuff better than I do, would say that you need to maintain a, a sense of community that’s kind of more than 80%.

If you want a certain group of people to act in a certain way, you need about 80% of the people plus to act in that way, and then it’ll sustain. But if it starts. To drift so that only 20% of people are acting a certain way, then that is gonna ex extinguish that elements of the culture. So we need to keep topping up our Sure, okay.

Our, our [00:25:00] immersive training with people, and we’re also then thinking about the contract partners that we have and also leaving a bit of a legacy. For the communities in Scotland, because we’ve got a center that we’re gonna be using a little bit less because we’ve fortunate to get the bulk of our people in SSE through, uh, we’re working with contract partners.

They probably want to use it for. For their own purposes and also other community groups. So we’ve had all kinds of people from all these different companies here. We’ve had the Scottish first Minister here, we’ve had loads of people who’ve been really quite interested to see what we’re doing. And as a result of that, they’ve started to, uh, to, to step their way through doing something different themselves.

So,

Allen Hall: so that may change the, the future of at t also. And in terms of the slight approach, the scenarios they’re in. The culture changes, right? Yeah. Everybody changes. You don’t wanna be stuck in time.

Dermot Kerrigan: No, absolutely.

Allen Hall: That’s one thing at t is not,

Dermot Kerrigan: no, it’s not

Allen Hall: stuck in time.

Dermot Kerrigan: But, uh, I mean, you know, we first started out with the centers, uh, accommodating project.

Yeah. So this would [00:26:00] be an induction space. You might have guys who were gonna work on a project for two weeks, other guys who were gonna work on it for six months. They wanted to put them through the same experience. Mm. So that when they weren’t on site. That they could say, refer back to the, the, the, the induction and say, well, why ask me to do that?

You know, we, we, we both have that experience, so I’m gonna challenge you and you’re gonna accept challenge, et cetera. So it was always gonna be a short, sharp shock. But actually, if you’re working with an organization, you don’t necessarily have to take that approach. You could put people through a little bit of, of, of, of the training, give ’em a chance to practice, give ’em a chance to reflect, and then go on to the next stage.

Um. So it, it becomes more of a, a journey rather than a single hard, a single event experience. Yeah. You don’t learn to drive in a day really, do you? You know, you have to, well, I do transfer it to your right brain and practice, you know?

Allen Hall: Right. The more times you see an experience that the more it’s memorable and especially with the, the training on how to work with others.[00:27:00]

A refresh of that is always good.

Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah.

Allen Hall: Pressure changes people and I think it’s always time to reflect and go back to what the culture is of SSE That’s important. So this, this has been fantastic and I, I have to. Thank SSC and a TT for allowing us to be here today. It was quite the journey to get here, but it’s been really enlightening.

Uh, and I, I think we’ve been an advocate of a TT and the training techniques that SSC uses. For well over a year. And everybody we run into, and in organizations, particularly in win, we say, you, you gotta call a TT, you gotta reach out because they’re doing things right. They’re gonna change your safety culture, they’re gonna change the way you work as an organization.

That takes time. That message takes time. But I do think they need to be reaching out and dermo. How do they do that? How do, how do they reach att?

Dermot Kerrigan: Uh, they contact me or they contact att. So info at Active Trading Team, us.

Allen Hall: Us. [00:28:00] There you go.

Dermot Kerrigan: or.co uk. There you go. If you’re on the other side of the pond. Yeah.

Allen Hall: Yes. And Mark, because you just established such a successful safety program, I’m sure people want to reach out and ask, and hopefully a lot of our US and Australian and Canadian to listen to this podcast. We’ll reach out and, and talk to you about how, what you have set up here, how do they get ahold of you?

Mark Patterson: I’ll give you a link that you can access in the podcast, if that. Great. And uh, look. The, the risk of putting yourself out there and talking about this sort of thing is you sometimes give the impression you’ve got everything sorted and we certainly don’t in SSE. And if the second you think you’ve got everything nailed in terms of safety in your approach, then, then you don’t.

Um, so we’ve got a lot left to do. Um, but I think this particular thing has made a difference to our colleagues and, and contract partners and just getting them home safe.

Allen Hall: Yes. Yes, so thank you. Just both of you. Mark Dermott, thank you so much for being on the podcast. We appreciate both [00:29:00] of you and yeah, I’d love to attend this again, this is.

Excellent, excellent training. Thanks, Alan. Thanks.

Inside ATT and SSE’s Faskally Safety Leadership Centre

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