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IntoMachines: Smarter Turbine Bolt Tensioning
Martin Kristelijn, the co-founder of IntoMachines, discusses innovative tools designed to make bolt tensioning faster, safer, and less expensive. The conversation highlights the challenges of manually tensioning thousands of bolts, the advantages of automated bolt tensioning for wind turbines, and the development of a weightless, more efficient tensioning system.
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Allen Hall: With wind turbines growing larger and bolts getting bigger, the industry needs smarter ways to handle critical bolted connections. This week we speak with Martin Kristelijn co-founder of IntoMachines. IntoMachines has developed unique tools that make bolt tensioning faster, safer, and much less expensive.
Welcome to Uptime, spotlight, shining light on wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow.
Allen Hall: Martin, welcome to. To the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight.
Martin Kristelijn: Thank you. Glad to be here.
Allen Hall: Martin, there’s a big problem out in the field that we have a lot of bolts to tension and not a lot of people to go do it. Plus I think as you and I had discussed previously, the bolt sizers are getting much bigger.
Everything is becoming heavier and just being very difficult to do into machines changes all that. But let’s talk about the problem first. What are you seeing on factory lines and out in service as people try to tension bolts.
Martin Kristelijn: Past couple of months, year, I would say we spoke to a lot of people visited wind turbines, went in the field, see our technicians tighten the bolts also to the factories, so Elle production you name it.
And well, the, we kept on keeping getting the same feedback over and over. That they would like to speed up the bolting process and also that they would like to increase the quality, so to prevent any loose bolts or forgotten bolts. That was really the starting point for us. We started to focus on bolt tensioning, to automate it, to speed it up, and to increase the quality.
Allen Hall: So tensioning is the way going forward. A lot of of us remember torquing as being the preferred method to tighten bolts, but tensioning is now the way you wanna describe why that is?
Martin Kristelijn: Yeah, still it depends on who you ask, but the main objective for everyone usually is to get a maintenance free building connection, right?
That you keep the maintenance cost as low as possible. So that’s also our goal. And bolt tensioning for us is the most yeah. Convenient way forward to reach that.
Allen Hall: It’s the most consistent way too, right? Is that with torquing, we really don’t know what the preload is on the bolt. That’s why engineers are preferring tension tools instead of torquing tools now.
Martin Kristelijn: Exactly. So with torquing you have a friction coefficient you need to take into account. That’s an unpredictable. Value parameter. So you would like to get rid of that. And you do that by just grabbing the bolt itself, apply hydraulic pressure and stretch the bolt directly. And then you have your hydraulic pressure times the surface of your tension to, and that gives you exactly the the preload in your bolt and you tighten the nut, release the pressure, and your bolt is perfectly pretense.
As simple as that,
Allen Hall: right? So that process takes time to do. And if you have a factory worker or a technician doing tensioning to a lot of bolts of which there are thousands on a wind turbine but there’s probably what, a couple hundred that are critical.
Martin Kristelijn: Yeah. So around, give or take, 600 bolts critical bolted connections in a wind turbine.
And imagine that I said tightening the nut by hand. You have a wrench wrenching each of those 600 bolts. Then you have your pull bar. You need to thread that onto your bolt as well, or bolt stop bolt. Yeah, I can tell you that you don’t want to do that all day by hand.
Allen Hall: So how does that work right now in, in the factories?
If they’re doing it by hand? Is it are they changing people at that station because it just has to wear you out? Those bolts are big and that technique of tensioning manually is tiresome, right?
Martin Kristelijn: Yeah, exactly. We visited some factories as well and also the installation sites. And the feedback we got is that people they hurt their arm.
And not after the 10 bolt, not after the a hundred bolt maybe. But after a thousand volts your arm really starts to hurt. And yeah. That’s not good for your workforce, right? People need to be happy they need to be coming to work with a smile and we try to, to accomplish that by automating this this job.
Allen Hall: Joel, if I had a tension a thousand bolts a day on Monday, I don’t, not sure. I would be going back on Tuesday, would you?
Joel Saxum: No. And I think of that on Saturday and Sunday. I’m definitely trying to get as much rest as possible. But if you, but you make this a little bit more, think about the complication here is because as the global fleet.
Grows. Okay. The conversation we just had was about in the factory in a controlled setting. That’s one thing, right? Like you can have these into machines like it, it’s a good size tool. There’s a lot of weight there. There’s, you have the classical tensioning tools, like that’s.
It’s all hydraulic, like there’s a lot of things, but it’s controlled because you’re in a factory, at least you have decent conditions to work in. Even now, see the fleet grow and see what the, the projections are for how many wind turbines are gonna be installed over the next 2, 5, 10, 20 years globally.
This is a problem that you guys are solving for people in the field in a big way, and that’s the important part for me, when I talk to technicians and I talk to people in the field. You’re lugging this equipment, it’s the classical equipment. You’re lugging it up there and you’re doing this and it’s strain and drain on the body.
And then we know that’s when the body gets worn down, then the mind gets worn down and that’s when HSE in incidents happen and we’re trying to reduce all of those things. That’s what you guys are working on. When someone goes into the field with this kit what are you guys seeing for the change in the operators or the change in the technicians?
Are they, do they have a big smile on their face when they see something like this?
Martin Kristelijn: Yeah. They, at least when we see them with our stuff in their hands, then they smile a lot. Yes. But no the bottom line is that the, this tool says, so for 42 attention tool, you are looking at 1520 kilograms.
With some electric motors on it, and that goes up to 50 kilograms or 60 for M 72 tensioner.
Allen Hall: That’s a hundred pounds Joel in America. That’s a very heavy tool.
Martin Kristelijn: Yeah. So you need to carry that along, let’s say 150 bolts in a flinch, and that’s one flange. Exactly. Yeah.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. And so like you, you go to an onshore turbine, say even your flange bolts, you have bolts on the foundation, then you have.
A lot of times, four to five tower sections, those all have to be bolted together.
Martin Kristelijn: Yeah. Something like that. Yeah.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. And now, and then you talk up in the nelle and you’re, you have the blade bolts that have to get attention and all kinds of things. So like you said, 600 different connections that need to be worked on.
So that was
Martin Kristelijn: Let’s say our starting point heavy tooling. And we thought, okay, how can we make these tools weightless for the operators and move them fast from one ball to the other? Because that’s also a thing you need to move it fast from one bolt to the other to complete your 150 bolts in time because in the end before dark, you want to go home, you need to finish the bolt bolts.
So what we did there is we designed a very specific lift trolley. It’s very low and compact, very lightweight as well. So you should have let’s say less problems with passing obstacles. For example, you have the stairs in the wind turbine and due to our low trolley design, it usually should go underneath the stairs.
So you’re not bothered by that. And it makes attention to weightless. If you combine. That literally with the automated tensioning tool we made. Yeah. Then you have an unbeatable system.
Allen Hall: Yeah. So that’s what in two machines has done, and your team over there are mechanical geniuses. You actually make the tension tool quasi weightless by using mechanical means.
So you’ve designed. Very smart systems tools in which the tension tool adapts into to make it so much easier to do. And we’re gonna put some of these tensioning tool improvement devices, I’ll call them on the YouTube version so people can see them. But the simplest version of this is the trolley.
And maybe Martin, you can describe what this thing is because. It’s a little hard to see. We’ll put it on YouTube, obviously. But for those listening, what does the trolley do in terms of the tensioning unit?
Martin Kristelijn: First of all it needs to operate in a very r rugged environment as a wind turbine.
So it needs to be super, super simple. It needs to be super robust and easy to maintain. We took, design. It’s made of steel, galvanized steel, so you can hit it with a hammer and it should still work. Then we made some nice interface brackets that you can just hang your attention to in the trolley.
Okay, and we have just a very simple gas spring, which compensates the weight of the tension tool.
Allen Hall: Okay? So now when you’re putting together tower sections, if you have this trolley that’s holding the tension tool, and so the technician is just using almost no force to lift the tension tool, make the tension tool do its thing and move it to the next bolt.
That I’ve watched that tool on your LinkedIn page, it is quite remarkable how fast that tool is. Just by making it more mobile and taking some of the weight away from the technician, that technician is much more productive.
Martin Kristelijn: Yeah, absolutely. If you have the trolley and then you have our smart tensioning system it is motorized.
So the tension tool comes from our partner Tension Pro. They’re very good at making tension tools. So we partnered up with them and we said, Hey, let’s make a kick ass product which we call the quantum Smart Tensioner. So they are very good at making tensioners. We are very good in developing user-friendly software and mechatronics.
So electric motors put that all together in the quantum system. And the basis for the quantum system, again, is a super robust system. Easy to maintain, easy to operate, and it yeah, no bells and whistles, let’s say. And so you don’t want it to break down. It needs to be a usable for practical people.
Let’s say, Ellen, if I take you in a wind turbine, I want to give you our quantum system. I will give you a 15 minute explanation, and then it’s so easy to operate that you can do the bolting works for us.
Allen Hall: Wow, that’s impressive because I’m probably not very good at that job. Martin, that Martin, that’s a big task you just took on.
But I have watched it. I’ve watched your videos and I do think I could do it.
Martin Kristelijn: I think so too, because I really believe in our content. Quantum system, so I really think you could do it for us.
Allen Hall: That tool is universal. It can be used in any tower, essentially anywhere. To speed up that process to get bolts, tensioned, and have all the quality data that you need, and to know that tower section has been properly installed now.
I’ve seen some more advancements on LinkedIn. I saw this little robot that was crawling around doing bolt tensioning, and it just blew my mind and that’s why I reached out to you like, whoa, okay, this is life altering for people. You wanna explain what that next generation is from the trolley up to this sort of crawling robot tensioning tool?
Martin Kristelijn: Yeah, absolutely. So our vision for the bold tensioning markets is that we want to speed up the process. To tension all those bolts quicker for the coming turbines and also to prevent any loose bolts. You do that by documenting each bolted connection. So we register the pressure, we register the nut angle, we register at the nut torque, we register the boat number.
All that stuff is nicely registered in a A PDF document. However if you can speed it up even more by using a robotic system, that’s our end goal. At the moment we are developing a autonomous bolt tensioning robot for blade bolts. So it’s it’s working in an cell factory there.
It’s just crawling around the hip. Tensioning all the bolts one by one. And then we develop we develop the quantum system in such a way that for the near future, let’s say yeah, coming year you can have the quantum system with a literally, and then a technician will operate it.
But that same quantum smart tensioner in one year, if we’ve launched the robot for, field usage. You can place that same quantum smart tensioner inside our robot and have a fully automated and autonomous bolt tensioning system.
Joel Saxum: I think an important thing to touch on here, Martin, is what the developments that you guys are doing.
We, when we said it earlier you’re experts in software, me and mechatronics. I’ve been around the robotics industry in wind, in oil and gas and sub-C, oil and gas. The best pieces of kit that come out that do that automated process or automate a task are ones like exactly like in two machines has created here that are robust and simple to operate.
There’s way too many tools out there that require a software engineer to be on site to do these things, right? Like when autonomous drones first came out for inspections in turbines. You would see three people at the base of the turbine and two of those people were literally software engineers, like going through code and fixing things and people got a little bit turned off by ’em ah, I can’t be doing this.
Or, I’ve been on sub c oil and gas projects before where you gotta. Fly an ROV technician, a mechatronics expert in from Norway for $2,500 a day to solve this problem that’s happening in Nigeria. Like you can’t have that, like that. That is a barrier to entry for robotics in this space.
You guys have taken the leap past that you’ve made it simple. You’ve made it robust, you’ve made it tough. You’ve made it so that people can operate these things without having a, a year long training course, and that you guys don’t have to be there to do it for them. So I think that’s one of the most important things to get across here for people that are listening, is if you want to make your operations more efficient in the field, if you want to have good data tracking for the tension that you’ve done.
Into machines has done the hard work, they’ve done the legwork to get to that stage. So I guess a question for you then, Martin, is what does it look like? What’s your track record in the field? How many of these things, how many bolts have you guys tensioned? What does it look like?
Martin Kristelijn: I have to say the product has launched quite recently.
We have several customers that say who are using the system. And the feedback we get back from them is indeed yeah, compared to what they had is that it’s faster and easier to operate, but also that we and that’s very difficult to have to say that we don’t have a lot of sensors. We don’t have difficult software.
So it’s all straightforward to operate what I said with 15 minutes, I can teach Alan how to tension a flinch altogether with the quantum system. Yeah we really went back to basic. We stripped all the unnecessary stuff from it, which could break down. We took it off and only the bare minimum we kept such that the guys in the field that they need to use it every day, that they’re also happy to use it.
And indeed they don’t need to read the user manual every day before they start a job. That’s not what we want.
Allen Hall: You must be the technician’s best friend after they use that tool for a day or two. They must love into machines.
Martin Kristelijn: Yeah. Yeah. We, yeah, actually we always say what I said, we always go go away with the smile from our turbines and the guys trying our our equipment as well.
So that’s always really good feedback.
Joel Saxum: I think there’s something to be said there too for the global problem that we have, I in, in the wind world is technician shortage, right? And so we’ve talked to Alan and I’ve talked to quite a few people working in this space. How do we tackle this problem?
How can we get more training, get more people in here? One of the things that we can ensure that we can do is make it easier for the technicians in the field to get up to speed fast, to be able to get a task done without having to have five years of experience to figure out how to do it. So now you can bring someone that’s fairly green to the industry.
They’ve got their safety certifications. They know what they’re doing. They know their way around a turbine, but now they can be. The torque or the, I would say the torque tensioning technician, but I’ll say the tensioning tech technician. But they can do it in a relatively short amount of time, so that helps the overall industry and or, an ISP or an EPC contract or whatever it is, scale their workforce up faster to get more projects done.
With high quality at speed, and that’s what we want. That’s the, you guys are doing, you’re doing the hard work, the heavy lifting for the industry.
Martin Kristelijn: Yeah. That was for us also one key factor to make this thing work. Because what I said, we are a relatively new player into machines is now five years old.
And yeah, we set together with tension problem. We said, okay, in order to make this work. It’s you should be operated, be able to operate it within that 15 minutes and maybe, okay, maybe it takes you half an hour, but then you really are up to speed with the system and you yeah you just can go for it.
So speed is really really important for us.
Allen Hall: So where is in two machines at, on the planet at the moment? I know you’re all over Europe. Are you in the States? Are you in Australia or are you in South America?
Martin Kristelijn: Our office is based in the Netherlands. So that, that’s Europe. Then we have some systems in Europe itself.
We have some systems in Asia, and we’re now looking in looking for the US So we have some, some talks there to to launch the product.
Allen Hall: I could see a lot of opportunity in the United States, and Joel and I have been to some of those places and watched bolts being assembled manually.
It just seemed like an arduous process. And because I, I think a lot of operators have not seen you in, a lot of technicians haven’t seen you. They need to get to your website and check this out. Where do they go?
Martin Kristelijn: The first thing they go is to into machines.com. That I see some product videos of us had to get a feel of how it looks, how it works, the products.
So the lift trolleys the quantum system, quantum Smart Tensioner, as well as the fully autonomous tensioning robot. And we have a very active LinkedIn page into machines where you can see also videos inside wind turbines where we have the trolleys. The lift rolls and also the robots jumping around on a flinch.
So that’s that’s the stuff you want to see.
Allen Hall: Martin, if I wanna demo one of your robotic assistants and make tensioning so much easier, how do I do that? Can I get my hands on the tool to try it out?
Martin Kristelijn: Yeah, you can. So the first thing you do or you can do is send us an email sales@intomachines.com.
Then we we’ll arrange, a demo for you and the second is send us a DM on the link LinkedIn page. Then we we’ll also organize a demo and an online call to answer all the questions.
Allen Hall: And once you try it, you’re going to want to buy it because that tool is gonna save you a tremendous amount of time.
And so you need to check out into machines.com if you wanna see all the wonderful things that Martin and his team has designed. Martin, you’re always coming up with really cool ideas and putting ’em into action and saving the wind industry. Tremendous amount of labor and time and effort in making the job simpler, which is what we need to do.
So congratulations, really good tools.
Martin Kristelijn: Thank you very much for that.
Allen Hall: And thanks for being on the podcast. We love having you on.
Martin Kristelijn: Yeah, I also loved speaking to you about about these topics. Really nice.
https://weatherguardwind.com/intomachines-turbine-bolt-tensioning/
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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!
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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.
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