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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!

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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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Malloy Wind and NSK on Main Bearing Failures

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Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Malloy Wind and NSK on Main Bearing Failures

Cory Mittleider of Malloy Wind and Loren Walton of NSK on main bearing failures, why the industry is pulling DLC coatings, and the material changes replacing them.

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 YouTubeLinkedin 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!


Allen Hall: Cory and Loren, welcome back to the podcast.

Cory Mittleider: Thanks for having us.

Allen Hall: So we’ve got two bearing experts in one location, and this is the point where we start asking all of our bearing questions. Cory, you’re with Malloy Wind, and we’ve had you on the podcast two or three different times. Loren’s with NSK — we’ve had Loren on at least once before.

Loren Walton: Once, yes.

Allen Hall: Yeah, and that was good.

Loren Walton: I appreciate that. It was fun.

Allen Hall: There are a lot of bearing issues happening in the States at the moment, but also globally. Whatever happens in the States, you can pretty much find in Australia, Canada, Singapore, Mexico, South America, Brazil — everywhere. We’re hearing a lot about main bearings, and there’s a variety of things that I think you two know from being on the inside that we on the outside haven’t heard yet. I want to get some of those stories out and understand what’s going on, because operators are trying to keep their assets running, and bearings are a big issue. Let’s talk main bearings. What are you seeing in the field right now? What kinds of problems are happening?

Cory Mittleider: It seems like operators are coming to us and asking us to supply bearings that no longer have DLC. That’s a bit of a phenomenon lately. For a little over a decade we spent our time supplying bearings with DLC on the rollers to address problems found fifteen years ago.

Allen Hall: DLC is diamond-like coating.

Cory Mittleider: Correct.

Allen Hall: Which is a really hard specialty coating applied to the bearing surfaces to provide hardness and durability — or it’s supposed to provide durability.

Cory Mittleider: That’s a good point. It’s a coating that’s one to two microns thick — one to two thousandths of a millimeter — and a very hard material. The big feature was that it’s a dissimilar material to the steel. So when we break through the mixed and boundary lubrication regimes and those asperities touch each other, that dissimilar material prevents the welding and tearing that leads to the peeling damage we saw fifteen years ago. That peeling damage eventually turned into spalling, cracking, and other failures. So it made a lot of sense at the time to turn to something like this to mitigate the peeling.

Allen Hall: So the peeling damage was one of those issues where you basically had some sliding happening. In my electrical world, and from looking at these on the ground, you see things moving relative to one another instead of rolling relative to one another.

Loren Walton: It’s more of a welding and shearing of the contacts. I used a finger analogy last time: think of your asperities as fingers — one set is the roller, one set is the outer raceway. They weld under high load and high pressure, then they shear, leaving behind debris. That’s what creates the beginning of the peeling damage, and then it continues to create more debris, and the bearing starts to basically eat itself alive.

Allen Hall: The start of that process, though — is that a lack of lubrication, or a finish or hardness issue on the bearing?

Loren Walton: I love that question, because this is the crux of the whole thing, and I think it’s the part that gets missed. People immediately want to throw the whole thing out and start over with something different. Fundamentally, when we fixed the surface issue by adding the coating, the problems pretty much went away. We went from one-to-five years of life to ten-plus years, depending on the application — without changing the construction, the bearing type, or the contact angle. Just by adding the coating, we increased life significantly. The root of what you’re asking is that the bearing would operate better if it had the proper amount of separation. It’s not a fatigue issue and it’s not a loading issue. At its heart, the bearing isn’t able to create that separation. There isn’t enough speed, and there isn’t enough of a gap created by the lubricant.

Allen Hall: So ideally you have this almost molecular-scale film of lubricant between the two surfaces. If it isn’t designed properly, or you have an issue, that lubricant gets squeezed out of the space, and at that point you have trouble. That’s some of what I’m hearing on main bearings — especially when turbines have been curtailed and aren’t turning. Is that partly just the fact that there’s so much load?

Cory Mittleider: I think that’s a fundamental difficulty of the main shaft bearing. You’ve got extremely variable loads, from full load to idle, and a wide range of operating conditions — from northern North Dakota in the winter to Texas in the heat this week. High load, heavy load, incredibly slow speed, and even slower if it’s idling. It’s hard to reliably build that film. It’s not necessarily that there isn’t enough lubrication; it’s that the film isn’t building properly where it needs to be to separate the metal and the rolling elements.

Allen Hall: So the diamond-like coating was meant to solve that welding problem — you put the coated bearing in, and it worked okay until more recently, when all of a sudden we started having other issues. To me those aren’t related to the coating itself, but to other things happening up in the nacelle.

Loren Walton: If we recall some of your previous episodes, you were on the forefront of understanding and talking about DLC starting to become an accelerant to failure. I know you talked about it with Cory. Those episodes have aged very well. A lot of people now are recognizing what we were saying years ago and changing their strategy toward removing DLC — whether on bearings for newer turbines, typically two megawatts and greater, or in some cases going backwards and removing DLC as they do additional replacements, and looking for another solution, because there’s potential for additional issues you weren’t expecting by adding the coating.

Allen Hall: The coating is non-conductive, which is part of the issue, because you wouldn’t think bearings are conducting electricity. But as turbines got some of these uptower and downtower converters and inverters connected to the generator, we started seeing current levels — according to Motor Doc, where people like Howard Penrose have gone out and measured currents in the nacelles — of well over a hundred amps running through ground straps and the like, into bearings. That’s a lot of current. If you’re shoving that into a bearing that has DLC on it, you’re going to break it down and create these really hard steel bits stuck inside the bearing, which wear it like pouring sand inside a bearing. That’s what eventually happens, and it has nothing to do with the bearing. It has more to do with the electrical and control systems we stuck up top and didn’t pay much attention to, but probably should have. We created an electrical situation, and now all the upkeep comes to people like you to deal with. You haven’t seen a lot of work to eliminate it, although there are a couple of good attempts happening. The reality is: okay, we have to have a bearing, and I’ve got this current going around from the nacelle. How do I put those together in a way that removes the DLC?

Cory Mittleider: That’s what we’ve spent the last ten-plus years on. As a bearing supplier, we can’t change the whole system. We have to do the best we can to accommodate what’s happening in your system. We would absolutely encourage you, if you can identify and remove the electricity, please do that.

Allen Hall: They should. And there are a lot of people who do.

Cory Mittleider: There’s a pursuit of that, absolutely. But the turbine still needs to run.

Loren Walton: We work very closely with an owner-operator that did a lot of that work. To your point from before, it does sound like, from what they’ve investigated, the current has been there for a while. It’s been there in different models and different turbines. Maybe the way it presented, or its impact, wasn’t to the same extent as what we’re seeing now. That’s where I’d say there’s more to it than just the current. I think I said last time it’s not just a smoking gun. The bearing is sitting in front of a firing squad. You put it all together and now we’re in a tough position. But to Cory’s point, we get brought the application, we get brought the environment, and we get told, “Here, make it work.”

Allen Hall: And you don’t actually see everything that’s happened. You get all the mechanical loads, but they don’t tell you, “Hey, we’re running a hundred amps through this nacelle.”

Loren Walton: No, I don’t remember hearing that.

Cory Mittleider: No, that’s not usually disclosed.

Allen Hall: No one’s ever said that. So that’s a real troubling thing happening in the industry — we’re assigning blame to mechanical components when really it’s an electrical mistake. When you dig into it, what you find is that currents have been running up top for years, but what’s changed now is that with more focus on emissions from inverters, they’ve pushed things into higher frequencies. Higher frequency bands are harder to ground out and get rid of. When things were in the kilohertz range, we could partly ground them and they’d go away. Now we’re working at ten kilohertz and up, and that energy distributes into a lot of places, including the bearings, where it wasn’t before. That’s really hard to deal with. Some electrical designer sitting in a remote location, probably in Germany, designs the circuit, and now you bearing gurus have to go fix it.

Cory Mittleider: And that system’s probably well optimized for that particular package.

Allen Hall: For that particular package, right. It meets all the requirements and does everything they wanted — except for the effect on the bearings.

Loren Walton: You solve one problem and move it to another. That’s ultimately how it works.

Allen Hall: If you’re an electrical engineer, you’d never have thought you were destroying the bearings. The industry has moved quite quickly, though. Everybody started noticing this problem with DLC. They went out to check and figure out what the problem was, and, more importantly, to find a solution. Those solutions are unique, because the reason DLC went on in the first place was to extend lifetime. So if you’re taking the DLC out of the equation, can you still get to those lifetime numbers without it?

Loren Walton: Yeah, and that’s where our message has been that adjusting the material will get you the difference you’re looking for. I want to be very clear: I’m not saying DLC as a solution is bad. When it was applied in the right space — turbines with a lighter duty — it worked great. But once you add in additional factors, it becomes an accelerant to failure at certain points. So it definitely still has its place. But once you move away from DLC, you’re going to be right back where you started — regardless of construction — with the life that was always aided by DLC. Once you’ve removed it, you have to know for sure you’re not going right back to the peeling layers and the spalling you were seeing. From what we’ve investigated, the material changes are where you get that. Having a harder surface combats it, and having a better way to combat any additional debris introduced into the system helps.

Allen Hall: And reducing the possibility of generating that debris.

Loren Walton: Correct.

Allen Hall: So what does that mean in terms of bearing design — different alloys, different heat treats, different coatings?

Loren Walton: The first two, not the third. From the recipe of the steel, adjusting some of the alloying elements, there’s a lot you can do. A lot of people think of engineering mostly through the mechanics of it, but one part of mechanical engineering that doesn’t get talked about is material science. That’s the part we dive into extremely deeply, and it gives you the biggest bang for your buck when you’re moving away from a coating as your — I don’t want to call it a crutch, but as the thing helping you get by — toward changing the bearing from the inside so it lasts better once the coating is gone.

Cory Mittleider: I like describing it as being baked into the cake. It’s not a nice thing added afterward like a coating that’s one to two microns thick. It is the bearing.

Allen Hall: It’s hard to think about steel and a lot of the metals used in the bearing industry as unique chemistries, but they are. There are a lot of varieties of steel, just like there are a lot of varieties of copper or aluminum.

Loren Walton: Yes.

Allen Hall: You’d think steel is just steel — we make cars out of it, airplanes, whatever.

Loren Walton: I was talking to someone who’s more into gears, and even when I spoke of a carbon-nitride version of a bearing versus a carbon-nitride version of a gear, it’s not exactly the same. For all intents and purposes it’s easier for everyone to consider it as steel — one word, means the same thing. But once you get into how much chromium is in it, how much molybdenum, how much manganese —

Allen Hall: It comes down to that, and it can be very small percentages of the total.

Loren Walton: It can make a huge difference. And then you get into the heat treat — your time, your soaking, what you do for quenching. It all matters, and everyone does it differently, so you get different results.

Allen Hall: That’s the kicker. You see a lot of discussions where it’s just, “Oh, it’s been heat treated.” As an electrical engineer I used to see it that way too. But there’s heat treatment and there’s heat treatment. It depends on what you’re doing and what the result needs to be, because you’re changing the whole crystalline structure of the steel. The way you do it and the way you quench it all matters. It’s not one size fits all.

Loren Walton: That’s the part that gets glossed over so quickly, because everyone’s eyes go to what they can see. You change an angle here or there, or the bearing type, and you can see that. It’s different when you don’t have X-ray vision to tell you where all the alloying elements are and in what percentages, and then whether you carburized it, through-hardened it, or carbonitrided it. There’s so much to it that I can see people’s heads start to spin. That’s where we say there are a lot of experts out here — you two are among them, and there are others. Engage in conversations. Ask questions.

Allen Hall: That’s a great call to action — “Cory, help me understand what’s going on.” There’s a variety of bearings out there. Loren’s with NSK, a great bearing company with tremendous history. Those are a couple you can trust. But operators can feel inundated by the guy down the street trying to sell them a bearing, and you don’t know if that’s the right solution for your two-million-dollar wind turbine.

Cory Mittleider: These are critical infrastructure assets. Let’s make sure we understand what we’re doing and why. To Loren’s point, you can open three boxes and they all look the same, but what’s inside is what really matters.

Allen Hall: It’s a tremendously difficult business. With as many main bearings getting swapped out today, over the last couple of years there have been a lot of decisions made on the fly — some correct, some really wrong.

Loren Walton: I’d hesitate to say wrong, because I think people are doing the best they can. It’s not because they’re not trying.

Allen Hall: It’s because they don’t have the knowledge in front of them, or maybe they haven’t made the call to Malloy or NSK yet to get the ground truth.

Loren Walton: What you mentioned a second ago is pivotal. There’s been enough selling that we’ve kind of gotten away from the engineering. People hear “sales engineer” and they cut off at “sales.” If we can get back to the engineering, a lot more people will improve their assets. And it doesn’t have to be just listening to Cory and me — poll the audience. There are a lot of us out here. Everybody has a different background; we all know a little about this or a lot about that. Take the opportunity to learn. I’d liken it to your personal life: you wouldn’t buy a new vehicle or a stereo system without doing your own research. You wouldn’t just listen to the salesperson and buy the first thing you see. It’s the same here. If you’re making decisions without engaging at least the top three to five people in this space, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

Allen Hall: And that’s what happens a lot, because people get pushed. There’s a timeline, especially now with the repower situation — “I’ve got to put something on now.”

Cory Mittleider: Right. And new platforms — the next-generation three, four, five, six megawatt platforms, and offshore — are having their first failures. We need to learn from it. That’s where we’ve worked with operators to participate in the teardown and collect the sample. We get clues, we mark it up, and we do a lot of the investigation — metallurgy, metrology, raceway traces — to inform us on what the problem is on that specific platform.

Allen Hall: As we get to these bigger turbines, some data is coming back on O&M costs relative to a one or two megawatt machine, and it doesn’t scale linearly. It goes almost exponentially, because everything is more expensive. Replacing a bearing on a six megawatt machine is a much more expensive ordeal than on a two megawatt machine. What should we be paying attention to and monitoring more closely on these larger machines? The new shiny turbine is great, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to monitor and maintain it.

Loren Walton: I’d start with verifying all your original fits and clearances. We’ve had cases with a four-point mount main shaft — two main bearings — where one side wasn’t installed properly from the beginning, so it didn’t actually float. It’s supposed to be a fixed side and a floating side; now you’ve got one side that’s not floating, and you get overload. So make sure you’re set from the start. A lot of machines now come already outfitted with instrumentation — vibration monitoring, oil monitoring, different ways to start trending from the beginning. Back when we got started, that wasn’t the case. You got your new turbine and in a lot of cases it had nothing on it — you were flying blind. Now that it’s there, use it.

Cory Mittleider: That’s a good point. Specifically to bearings, something earlier versions didn’t have, and newer ones mostly do, is auto-lubers.

Allen Hall: I see more of those lately.

Cory Mittleider: That’s great from a lubrication-delivery and reliability point of view, but it’s its own little machine. We’ve heard of cases where the auto-luber failed, or ran when it shouldn’t have, or for whatever reason had very large output. So you need regular assessment of the entire system, including uptower.

Allen Hall: You’ve got to monitor everything that’s uptower.

Cory Mittleider: It’s its own little machine. It requires its own maintenance. If you’re relying on it, you’ve got to check it.

Allen Hall: As we move into these larger machines and see more of them deployed, what are the useful things you should be doing in that first year to make sure your bearing is working optimally? Is it just checking vibration levels? Is it getting uptower and doing a quick sweep to confirm the grease isn’t oozing out where it shouldn’t be? Is it that simple?

Loren Walton: Having a regular maintenance interval definitely helps. Even getting grease sampling to understand your baseline levels after the first six months and the first year. In a lot of cases the turbines are under a couple-year warranty, so maybe you don’t have as much access. But as much as you can, getting a baseline is huge, because you’re going to want to compare later. You’ll want to say, “Okay, I took this grease sample — what does it mean? Does it normally run that high or not?” Same for vibration, getting the trending. For main bearings in general, more grease is better than less, because you can never quite get it all out when you’re regreasing. So a lot of that first year or two is about getting a good baseline so you know what you’re actually expecting, and what it means when you take a reading in year two or three.

Allen Hall: What does a grease sample look like in terms of the response you get back? I take a sample, send it to a lab, and it comes back with — what? Is it “good or bad,” or a bunch of chemical numbers about composition and dirt? I’ve never seen one.

Cory Mittleider: It’s a matrix. You can request different versions, but probably ten or fifteen different elements they give you numbers on, in parts per million. Iron and brass will be up there.

Allen Hall: So if you see something floating in the grease —

Cory Mittleider: Silicon, phosphorus, water.

Allen Hall: Water would not be great.

Cory Mittleider: No.

Allen Hall: So those reports come back, and I assume there’s more knowledge needed to interpret the results. What do you do?

Loren Walton: We have some guidelines we share with our partners and customers. If you see a certain amount of parts per million of copper, ferrous material, or the like, we can say, “That’s worth monitoring for a while,” or “You should probably purge it, try to get it out, and see if it stabilizes.” We get those questions and respond in kind. There’s definitely help available. If we work together, we typically have a lot more success. A lot of people right now feel like they’re trying to work in their own silos, and you don’t have to do that. You don’t have to be the subject-matter expert for lubricants, gears, bearings, and everything else. You can reach out to experts who can help, and hopefully that frees up your time to assess and work on other things.

Allen Hall: The turbines are so complex today. It used to be you could have one person on site who knew most of what was going wrong, because they’d made thousands of these things — there was a legacy. When you get to six megawatt machines, where you don’t have a lot of history, particularly in the United States, there’s really no one to ask. You’d better find somebody who knows what they’re talking about.

Cory Mittleider: And the operators are responsible for multiple systems — six or seven or eight systems they’re looking at. We can help with bearings; we’re niche and focused on that. If we can take that off your plate, now instead of six systems you’ve got five to worry about.

Allen Hall: That’s key. There are experts out there, and one thing the podcast is trying to do is give those experts a chance to talk so you know who to ask. Your phones should be ringing right about now, because it’s repower time, and it’s main-bearing repair and replace time, pitch-bearing repair and replace time. There’s a lot of bearing activity going on. I always say call Malloy Wind if you need somebody who really knows their stuff, the technology, and what’s going on internally. How do people get ahold of you two if they have questions? What’s the easiest way?

Loren Walton: I try to be at most of the industry events. We usually hold a booth. And my email, my phone number — I’m on LinkedIn, so reach out there. After our last discussion I had a few folks reach out, actually mostly from other countries. It was interesting; we heard about a few issues before they even hit the US. Some folks were having problems with the larger turbines, and we were able to get our teams in Brazil and Spain involved right away. Then once it started cropping up in the US, I could say, “Yeah, I already solved that.” We can put my email in the show notes.

Allen Hall: We’ll put it in the show notes for sure. And Cory, how do people get ahold of you?

Cory Mittleider: I’m pretty active at the events — ACP, and the Drivetrain Reliability Collaborative is another one we had a couple of months ago. Email, phone, and I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. I’ve had similar experiences to Loren, getting contacted from other countries across the globe. It’s fun to investigate problems and share results in the technical articles on our website, and have people send me a picture of an article I wrote and say, “Hey, let’s talk about this.”

Allen Hall: Your articles are great. Check out malloywind.com — just Google it and it’ll come right to the top. If you have bearing questions or something you’ve seen, that website is a great first place to get some answers. It’s very helpful. Well, Loren and Cory, I love having you on the podcast. We need to have you on more, because there’s a lot going on in the bearing world.

Loren Walton: There are things we didn’t even touch on today.

Allen Hall: You’re always welcome back.

Loren Walton: Awesome. Appreciate it.

Allen Hall: Thank you.

Malloy Wind and NSK on Main Bearing Failures

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Wrong State

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Minnesota is home to intelligent, well-educated people whose approval of Trump is lower than that of toenail fungus.

If Lindell wants to lead a state, he needs to choose one at least 800 miles away. Oklahoma?

He may also want to consider that Trump is easily the most detested person in this nation.

Wrong State

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Renewable Energy

The Existence of God

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I wouldn’t say that the burden of proof lies on religion.  No one knows how the universe got here.

The Big Bang was an event in which there was no chaos, no “entropy,” as we say in thermodynamics.  How did all this orderliness get there 13.87 billion years ago? No one knows. This is an issue in cosmology which is quite likely to outlast human civilization on this planet.

I’m an atheist for a few reasons, one of which is that saying that God created the universe doesn’t get us any closer to an understanding of the cosmos, if only because it raises the question: Who made God?

More to the point, there are hundreds of moral reasons to disbelieve in God.  Each year, 9 million children will die unbaptized on this planet before their fifth birthdays.  In the bible, we learn that God punishes them all with an eternity of torture in hell.  To what sort of weirdo does this make sense?

The Existence of God

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