Connect with us

Published

on

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Why Two-Piece Blades Create Massive Engineering Problems

Register for the next SkySpecs Webinar! We discuss China’s new 20MW floating turbine by CRRC, and Nordex’s patent application for modular blade assembly. Plus HeliService USA’s offshore ambulance service and the recent construction delays at Atlantic Shores and Vineyard Wind.

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

Allen Hall: Our next SkySpecs webinar, if you missed the last one, about lightning protection and how to use SkySpecs, drone imaging and data, and the EOLOGIX-PING Lightning sensor to help yourself on the lightning side. You can actually watch that on the SkySpecs. Just go to SkySpecs and you can see that webinar.

It’s free. All this stuff is free. It’s all great stuff. All you need to do is register. You can get all this information. The next one is coming up on June 25th, 11:00 AM Eastern Time. And this next, webinar is gonna have Liam McGrath from RWE, who’s a blade engineer there, and Tom Brady from SkySpecs, who handles all the cool drone technologies.

So if you haven’t met Tom, you need to go to this webinar and find out what’s going on. And Michael McQueenie from SkySpecs. It’s the rule. Subject is when should you be scheduling your drone inspections and you shouldn’t be doing it in the spring. That’s really important. If you wanna save some money on your operational aspects, your [00:01:00] o and m budget, you need to be thinking about how to get your inspections done, when to get your inspections done, and what tools are available to you at different times a year.

So there’s optimal times to get your drones inspected and there’s suboptimal times. Suboptimal times is like March. Don’t do it, then do it the previous fall. and so Joel will be there. I will be there. Don’t miss it. It is June 25th. 11:00 AM and you can sign up in the show notes below.

Speaker 2: You’re listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, brought to you by build turbines.com.

Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now, here’s your hosts. Alan Hall, Joel Saxon, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.

Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I have Joel Saxo along and Rosemary Barnes from Australia and I’ve. Just been digging through all the news over the last several days.

Really disappointing news to the United States, but over [00:02:00] in China. TRRC has unveiled a 20 megawatt floating wind turbine, and it’s, has a rotor diameter of 260 meters, which is not really outrageous. The CRRC press release, which is a little outrageous, let, me read you some of this, and it’s called The Key Hung.

wind turbine, the key Hung, integrates multiple innovative control technologies offering four core advantages. High intelligence system, modularization, full chain collaboration. And Joel, don’t we all want that? And exceptional stability. It incorporates various intelligent controls, sensing and detection technologies that design further enhances the unit’s flexibility and efficiency by modularizing key system interfaces and structural components.

So there are a lot of words in this press release, but they don’t say, actually say anything at all. So that’s why we have Rosemary here to suss

Joel Saxum: out.

Allen Hall: What is happening with CRRC and a [00:03:00] 20 megawatt floating turbine? Is it really needed, Rosemary?

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think I’ve made my thoughts clear about the, like bigger, kind of pursuit of, offshore wind turbines.

And I think that a lot of it is about prestige to be the, first with the biggest. and so I guess that this is the, first with the biggest, floating offshore wind turbine. I, yeah, I don’t think that we’re really ready for, that with floating offshore wind. Floating offshore wind is still in the period where we’re trying to figure out what are the really important design requirements.

How are we gonna deal with some special, issues that floating offshore wind finds. So if you combine all of that with floating offshore wind, or there’s all the, like the, yeah, the floating platform, the mooring mechanisms, control systems, any weird aerodynamics that are happening because of slight tilting or whatever.

There’s all that sort of stuff. It’s still being, learned about. [00:04:00] And at the same time, you’re gonna combine that with all of the really huge blade, really huge turbine problems. I, think that. It’s a little bit crazy if this is intended as, being a commercial offering, it’s probably not, it’s probably a learning exercise and a publicity exercise more than that.

And, maybe from that point of view, like if you go into it trying to learn everything that you can about what would happen if we, eventually go this big, then I guess that there’s some value in that. but yeah, I, don’t think that we’re ready for, just rolling out thousands of these off the end of a production line.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, if you, I’m of course not an expert in Chinese maritime, GE geology. Sorry. But, there’s not a whole lot of super deep water right off of the Chinese coast. The Chinese coast is all 200 meters, like in every place that you’d put like a max step in every place that you’d put a wind turbine.

So if this was to be built for a, a [00:05:00] larger. Rollout. Where is it to sell to? Brazil? Oh, Brazil. Sure. Brazil. That would make sense. That could be right. but I don’t think, like if, China has very ambitious wind goals. And of course if you watch the. Any kind of news, you can see them rolling out large wind farms, left and right, onshore, offshore, all kinds of stuff.

But I don’t think they actually need the floating technology to be honest with you. So it might just be a show of force.

Rosemary Barnes: And also depths of 200 meters, that is challenging or maybe that’s, I think that exceeds the current, maximum depth of fixed bottom, you could get there, but it, uses heaps of steel, the fixed, bottom, Yeah, design compared to what we assume that floating is gonna eventually achieve it. It should use less steel. But it’s funny because that’s one constraint that probably China of all countries doesn’t really have because they have this, like glut of, steel in China or they’re winding down with their, their construction.

[00:06:00] industry. So they have an oversupply of steel. a lot of countries are experiencing China, selling their steel, into those countries at really cheap prices as tariffs around the, world, not, just from the us. and in fact, the US tariffs on Chinese steel predate the Trump administration.

yeah, I, think that. Steel is one thing that China doesn’t have a huge short supply of. I would agree with you that this probably isn’t primarily aimed at their own domestic market. It’s probably more to do with the fact that China has dominance in, every, or at least nearly every energy technology at the moment.

And looking forward if floating offshore wind is gonna grow, then they probably wanna maintain, wanna be dominant in that as well. But I think the main markets that you see talked about for floating offshore wind, yeah, South Korea and Japan, some other, places around that area where they don’t [00:07:00] have a lot of good, renewable resources they can exploit.

And then there’s quite a lot of interest in Europe as well, probably as much because they’re just, really aggressive with their, renewable plans in general.

Joel Saxum: Just to highlight the difference between Western countries and how China operates. One of the things they brag about in this press release is the fact that CRCC, the China Railway Construction Corporation, that single entity is saying, we have a complete wind power equipment supply chain, as in we don’t need anybody else.

We’ve got it all solved ourself, and that’s. Very unique ’cause you’re just simply not gonna have that el elsewhere in the world. now can they execute on that? I don’t know. But it’s an interesting, it’s an interesting take

Allen Hall: and talking of offshore, if you haven’t received your latest PES Wind Magazine, the new edition is out and on the cover is hella service, USA, talking about their ambulance service that they’re offering on the east [00:08:00]coast of the United States.

And we were up there a couple of months ago when we met with everybody. Michael to Paul Russo, Dr. Kenneth Williams, who was with Brown University and had done all their ambulance work there. And obviously Sophie Crane. If you don’t know Sophie, you’re missing out. She’s, she’s really good, with, hella service USA, but they’re offering an ambulance service.

And the thing that Joel, that blew our mind when we were there, and if you can read about it in the article, it says there’s essentially two helicopters that service. The northeast of the United States from the US Coast Guard. So if you flip over your kayak in the ocean, rosemary off the, the coast, New Jersey, it may be a while, it may be several hours where someone can, help you and the US Coast Guard is just gonna pick up your carcass and take it and leave it at the front door of the hospital.

They are not skilled to provide any role paramedic services at all [00:09:00]besides just first aid care. but hella service USA is, it’s a completely different model and it’s, it is still shocking. At Rosemary, we were talking about. Australia, how those helicopters everywhere off the coast of Australia.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. any nice day when you could be at the beach in any part of the country, even where I go is the South coast and a lot of people there.

and yeah, you see a helicopter patrolling up and down, checking for any really big sharks, approaching groups of, big groups of people. So definitely we’ve got more than one helicopter for our entire coastline. yeah, it’s, interesting.

Joel Saxum: I think it’s just crazy. Like it’s not something you would think about from, just a general public safety thing.

and or an industrial safety thing, right? Because there’s a whole, there’s a, there’s other stuff going on in the water out there that could be used as okay, I’m gonna switch gears. We’ll go down to the Gulf Coast, F Port Fon out in hoa, [00:10:00]down in Brownsville. Like all of those places that the oil and gas industry has invested in these resources, Boom, that’s there, right? that’s not a problem. it’s a minute phone call. the, it is, however, 180 miles an hour from three minutes from the phone call, you’re gonna be there. And it’s amazing that I would like, I guess I’d like to see the, same thing on the West coast.

What is California, Washington, Oregon, what does their resources look like? ’cause it, just doesn’t make sense to me.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I know. We send, helicopters over to help with bush fires when you have them as well. But I don’t think that’s the same kind of helicopter because we have special ones that can carry heaps of water and then dump just a, whole, bunch of water on a, fire at once.

Joel Saxum: Like you said, the US Coast Guard, they have what’s their specialty bird called? Allen, the Dolphin. They have those, but yeah, they’re not there to be the world’s paramedic. They’re there for search and rescue.

Allen Hall: Yeah. And when we talked about it with, HEA service USA, it isn’t [00:11:00] the technicians and, my thought was a technician would have a broken limb or something really serious.

It could be as simple as appendicitis or an allergic reaction. Peanuts, a peanut allergy where time matters. And before hella service offered this ambulance service, you could end up taking a CTV and it would take a long time for some of these wind farms to get back. To true, healthcare that can really save your life.

So hea service USA is doing a tremendous job on the East coast and elsewhere. They’re expanding their reach as it seems. if you are, new to PS Wind, you need to download a copy of PS Wind, and you can do it@pswind.com. This issue is full of good information. You need to be reading it if you’re going to stay up.

Abreast of what’s happening in wind, you need to be reading PES. Wind.

Joel Saxum: As Busy Wind Energy Professionals. Staying informed is crucial and let’s face it difficult. [00:12:00] That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future.

Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PS wind.com today.

Allen Hall: some more bad news for us. Offshore wind is Atlantic Shores, which is a partnership between Shell and EDF renewables. North America has filed to cancel its 1.5 gigawatt offshore wind.

Project off the coast of New Jersey near Atlantic City, the company cited economic challenges including inflation, supply chain disruptions, and the administration’s federal permitting freeze as a primary reasons. Remember, a couple of months ago, the Environmental Protection Agency pulled the project’s air permit, and we talked about that on the podcast.

but it looks like some of these problems are insurmountable, so Shell and [00:13:00] EDF are going to pull the plug. Pulling the plug. Now, Joel doesn’t mean a permanent withdrawal, it just, I think it just means they’re on hold. I’m not a hundred percent sure on that. You still own the lease spot, right? So you still own the plot of ocean.

Joel Saxum: But if you’re going to the, basically the interconnect and saying no, we’re done here. I don’t know. They’re not gonna make it easy to, try to reopen that program. I know EDF laid off a bunch of their offshore people in shell’s, all but closed up their offshore arm. So I don’t see, I can see what, I’ll see if this is my take.

I see Shell and EDF trying to sell this thing, this the lease rights. I don’t know to who, but they’re, gonna take pennies on the dollar for it. But to get something out of it. If

Allen Hall: you think if they waited four years, they have an opportunity to sell it.

Joel Saxum: Maybe the best we’re gonna get is a, maybe. Is that lease, 20?

Is that lease 25 years? What is that lease? Oh, I would assume it’s longer than 25 years. It’d have to [00:14:00] be, but there should be a staged toed construction and then after construction, usually on a federal lease. So I don’t know how long those rights last

Allen Hall: are. Are they still, I guess if they didn’t cancel it, would they still be paying monthly payments to the federal government?

That’s a great question.

Joel Saxum: Or did they pay that in a lump sum?

Allen Hall: yeah. I thought the way the process worked is that they were, they paid the lump sum for the lease, the ability to have a lease, but the lease payments had to be made. And then when the construction started, that ramped up the price of the lease.

Isn’t that how it was laid

Joel Saxum: out? So you get five years and then 25 more. So you have a total of

Allen Hall: 30 years of that spot. So the average tri in life is 20 years. So you still have a couple years to play around here. Maybe that’s what they’re doing.

Joel Saxum: So it says the le the lessee has a period for site assessment, construction and operational planning, and then an operational term of [00:15:00] 25 years.

The initial site assessment period is typically five years, and the lessee must submit progress reports every six months. During this time, after the construction and operations plan is approved, the lessee has an operational term of 25 years.

Allen Hall: So what are our next steps, Joel? Do you think that, It just sits.

Joel Saxum: I think it’s gonna sit, I think it’s gonna sit, it’s gonna sit empty and naked and it’s gonna be a sore spot. there’s, there wasn’t anything out there before. But either way, it’s, economic opportunity that’s on the shelf. I. That’s really sad, right? There’s a lot of jobs from that.

if you went and we went back, if we go back and look at all the things when offshore windows coming, how excited along the East coast, all these governments and agencies and people got about all the jobs coming in, all the economic, stability coming in. All this money that the, supply chain companies that sprout it up and or built facilities or expanding facilities for.

Everything from steel to transport, logistics. [00:16:00] and now it’s just kind of me that’s not a very good American story.

Allen Hall: So moving north a little bit to vineyard wind, vineyard wind has extended its lease of the new Bedford Marine Commerce terminal through June, 2026, suggesting construction delays beyond the original.

2024 Now, 2025 completion date. The, project currently has four turbines sending power to Massachusetts out of the plan, 62 turbines at least, roughly 25 more bar trips are needed to complete construction, not counting the potential trips to remove, blades from, the Canadian factory. The, project has obviously faced some additional challenges lately, but I think.

GE was really hoping to finish that project, I thought this year, but it looks like it’s gonna roll in at least in, at least to early 2026. It’d be my guess. But if they [00:17:00] plan it out to June of 2026, like the, winter months in Massachusetts, south coast of Massachusetts are terrible. so I guess it gives them a couple more, more months to, to clean up at the end, right?

Joel Saxum: Yeah, absolutely. this is a big project, right? And any large capital project is gonna have delays. The delays for this thing have been very public, right? We know when they had stop works, go on up there, we know when they had some blade issues. and then of course having to dismount some blades, send them over to France, I believe it was to get fixed, send back.

yeah. if you follow offshore wind, almost every large project, every offshore wind project has delays, right? They’re usually never on schedule. it’s pretty rare and it’s just the nature of the marine operating environment. Oil and gas projects are the same way. You might, you can get a thing in there, ah, we’ll plan for, 20% weather and then all of a sudden you get two weeks straight of winds where it’s [00:18:00] blowing up the, heat we call, call the heave height, blowing up the waves too high.

You can’t operate. And it is as simple as that. Anybody that works in wind, even onshore, knows that, right? You can have a crane sitting on site for two weeks where you’re sitting there with twiddling your thumbs underneath the crane. ’cause, as soon as eight and a half meters per second of 10 minute average wind speed blows up.

You can’t move the dang thing. and you’re just stuck. So these things happen. They’re looking forward, 2026, so we should be done. Then

Allen Hall: the positive note is that they didn’t shut down the effort early, right? They would say they were gonna abandon it. They’re not gonna abandon it, they’re gonna complete it, which is great.

Massachusetts really needs that energy. Don’t let blade damage catch you off guard. OGs. Ping sensors detect issues before they become expensive. Time consuming problems from ice buildup and lightning strikes to pitch misalignment in internal blade cracks. OGs Ping has you covered. Their cutting edge sensors are easy to install, giving you the power to stop damage before it’s too late.

Visit eLog [00:19:00] ping.com and take control of your turbine’s health today. I was perusing the patent application database from the US Patent and Trademark Office. And honestly, who doesn’t do that in their spare time. And I noticed that there was a patent application, and that’s where all the cool technology is.

Don’t look for patents, look for patent applications, because that’s the latest and greatest. but there was a patent application from Nordics. For a modular blade assembly system, IEA two piece blade. And this approach, is a little bit different than what we’ve seen on the LM side for a two piece blade.

The LM design is a hole and a pin approach to connecting two pieces together. So it’s a relatively simple system that, that LM pursued. And I don’t wanna speak for Rosie, but I think Rosie thought. Do I really need it? is, wasn’t that the sort of summary of what the LM two piece blade output was?

Rosemary Barnes: Two piece [00:20:00] blades in general? it, it sounds like a very appealing thing because blades are very long, they’re hard to transport. They often require, road closures and choosing route carefully to make sure that you don’t have to, go around any tight corners or anything like that. So it sounds very appealing, but they’re inherently very challenging because.

the, a wind turbine blade is basically like a cantilever beam, and they use composite materials which rely like they’re very strong and stiff for their weight because they’ve got these long fibers and loads are transmitted along in the direction of those fibers. Yeah. So if you make a two piece blade, you necessarily cut, those, all those fibers in half in one, in one place.

so that’s challenging. And then if you try and look for, solutions to that. You want to, you need to be able to make the joint strong enough, but not add so much extra weight. And basically the way that a wind turbine blade is loaded, [00:21:00] it’s quite lightly loaded towards the tip. But then as you get to the root, all of the The moment forces from, the, the outboard section of the blade, they add up. So the biggest loads are at the root of the blade. So basically, if you wanna make your structural problem easier with a two piece blade, you’ll split it close to the tip. But then what’s the point in that? what you would obviously want to do is split it in the middle or thereabouts.

But that means, huge loads have to be transmitted through your pin joint, or whatever kind of joint that you had. And so it’s just inherently very challenging to do that.

Allen Hall: And that’s where the Nordic patent application, takes a different approach than what LM did. They basically have a sleeve design and a bolted design.

A hydraulics are used to pretension this joint. The images are a little unclear to me as an electrical engineer having [00:22:00] never built a two piece blade, but it does sound like they’re trying to address certain, mechanical loads in different ways. So like the, sleeve assembly is there, to react to the bending moments, and then the actual loads are handed through this threaded connection.

And then the pretension gets rid of any sort of fatigue problem, so they preload it. It’s a different approach, but the, I think the, cost benefit, at least from the application, says it will reduce transportation costs from roughly a hundred k, per blade to about 40,000 because you can put on a, basically a standard truck and, move them around, which is always the.

The emphasis on these two piece are now three piece. I guess it could be three pieces, blades from a application standpoint. Rosemary, this is a mechanical joint. It would seem like a lot of mechanical joints have been dealt with, but maybe it’s because it’s such a large [00:23:00] composite structure, this particular kind of mechanical joint have never been conceived of.

Is this something that, that, you have seen before, but it has been set aside for other reasons? Cost reasons.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I haven’t seen something exactly like this one. If you look at the sketches in the patent application, then you do see a lot of details that are trying to spread loads over a, a wider distance.

So it’s not trying to have, just this one narrow joint where all of the loads need to be transferred. However, there you are adding a whole lot of extra components to, a wind turbine blade and. it is really, it’s very challenging because they’ve got, millions and millions of fatigue cycles that these, blades have to deal with.

really high strain compared to any other kind of, structural component in a, different industry, a different application like this. This is really the hardest, the hardest example of, those kinds of [00:24:00] loading conditions. So it’s still, you’re still definitely going to be, either reducing fatigue performance or adding a, weight penalty and probably both.

so I, yeah, I, doubt that it’s a, perfect solution. Obviously they’ll develop as far as they can. It’s also worth noting that, so they can put it on a normal truck for, what is this, for three megawatt. Roughly turbines. Yeah, it, the blade length isn’t the only thing making transport of blades expensive.

So as you get much bigger than three megawatts, then you start to get a quite a large root diameter. And that is also a, constraint. You then you need to worry about getting under bridges and stuff like that. So it’s not the. It’s not the only thing, and it’s not gonna be like, oh, now we can transport 12 megawatt blades with 12 megawatt turbines on shore easily.

it’s definitely not gonna be that. So

Joel Saxum: are you talking about this root diameter [00:25:00] thing from the latest, Australian newspaper article? We saw

Rosemary Barnes: the one, I think there was a turbine, a tower segment. that got stuck under,

Joel Saxum: stuck under a bridge, I thought. Was that a tower segment? I thought it was the, for some reason I thought it was the root end.

Rosemary Barnes: The report reporting was terrible. it, like it and mentioned you just need to look at it to be like, oh, there’s a door on there. Okay. Yeah, it’s a, tower segment. and probably the bottom one. Yeah. And I, back to the split blade thing and whether it’s worth it, I guess that’s the thing, like it’s a solution to a problem.

Is the problem severe enough that the difficult solution is worth it? That I think is extremely debatable. So in the end, I think with the GE split Blade Cyprus, I don’t think that they sold any additional projects that they wouldn’t have been able to sell without this, split blade. That’s the word on the street.

if it’s true that you can reduce the transport cost by that much, then that would be very interesting. But I personally wouldn’t be rushing to be one of the first [00:26:00] people to get this blade because there’s so, much that can go wrong with it. And it is. Not possible to test, act absolutely every, little quirk of the operating environment.

You, you can’t test that all in the lab adequately to be totally sure that the first ones out in the field are gonna. Be reliable. yeah, I would wanna see, I would wanna be, like turbine 1000 after a few years experience before I, put, placed an order for my own wind farm, I think.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. One of the things that we saw with that existing two place, two piece model out in the field right now, the Cyprus, is that, there’s a couple of things, right?

There’s, the seal hasn’t been sealed quite right, but a lot of it boils down to. The technicians in the field that are putting these things together like they’re Desi, that joint was designed to be put together by high-end engineers in a factory.

Rosemary Barnes: It’s not their, it wasn’t their intention. Certainly everybody knows that you’re not gonna send an engineer around for every single blade that’s gonna be put [00:27:00] together,

Joel Saxum: but they, I’ve talked firsthand at people that are installing ’em in the field and they’re like.

We don’t really know how to put these things together. We’re just doing it.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, it wasn’t an easy, and that term poke yoke, it’s supposed to be poke yoke, that there’s only one way that you can install it. there’s no chance to get it wrong and it didn’t quite achieve that.

and I would suggest that. Yeah, looking at the, complexity in the design in these patents, I don’t think that’s gonna be totally straightforward to, install and, maintain and monitor. ’cause you shouldn’t have to monitor, your, blade to know, oh yeah, these. pins shaking loose and it’s gonna fall apart.

are you getting up there on rope every single year or six months to check the talk? that’s, really, you’re gonna burn through your transportation saving pretty quickly. But, if you have to get extra rope access inspections every year, so yeah, I think interesting.

I’m actually [00:28:00] not, sure if we’re ever going to see the split blade thing fulfill its potential. ’cause I do think that there’s other solutions to. To the transport issue. we already have them, right? They, cost a little bit more. But then, like I, I could imagine more likely that we’re gonna see, on, on site, manufacturing of blades or, thermoplastic blades that get welded together on site.

Or like I, I can see. Other things. Alan’s making airplane wing motions, big airplanes. No way. Come on.

Joel Saxum: Okay, so this week for the Wind Farm of the Week, I may or not, I may, I am gonna get some words wrong here because we’re taking a trip over to the Netherlands. This conversation started with a friend of mine, a friend of the show, Lars Benson, up in Canada, and we were talking about offshore wind in the Great Lakes.

Why not? There’s great wind resource. There is a need for renewable energy in places that can’t get a lot of renewable energies. Say like up [00:29:00] in Lake Superior for Wisconsin, the Univer or the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and other things like that. So we were talking about fresh water, wind farms. Is there any in the world?

What are the challenges they have? Turns out Wind Park Free Salon is the largest freshwater offshore wind farm in the world, and it’s in the Netherlands. so yeah, and it actually has over 380 megawatts in size. I didn’t know this. I didn’t, think any of ’em existed. There’s 89 Siemens Cesa, SWT Direct Drive, one 30 turbine.

So they’re 4.3 megawatts a piece, and they’ve laid ’em out in a hexagonal kind of shape. And this was to ease the, view of the eye and some other things for, the local considerations. And they dove in headfirst, local considerations. They did all kinds of things to make this a. A joint effort between the community and the developers.

one of the cool things they did was a lot of local sourcing local welding firms for making steel platforms, that [00:30:00] brought in other people that will have work for the lifetime of the wind farm, which is great. 720,000 euro per year for 20 years. Environmental fund that’s gonna be built by this wind farm.

another really cool one, a citizen investment. so the Province of Free Salon offered bonds to residents enabling them financial participation in the wind farm, so you could invest in it and take dividends from the wind farm as it produces energy, which I think is a really cool concept. but this one I think is one of the, one of the neatest ones ’cause I haven’t heard of this yet.

despite the initial fears of a tourism decline, the Wind farm has introduced new activities like the Windmill Cup. Which is an annual sailing race through the turbines organized by a local water sport association. Really? Yeah. I didn’t, never heard of any of this. Over in the Netherlands.

Congrats to our friends there for the, largest fresh water offshore wind farm in the world. And we hope we can draw on that over [00:31:00] here in the States. So for the Wind Farm of the Week, wind Park Free salon over from the Netherlands.

Allen Hall: Wow, that’s amazing. Thanks Lars for that tip. That’s really cool. that, that’s gonna do it for this week’s uptime Wind energy podcast.

Rosemary will be back next week, Joel. Are you coming back next week or? I

Joel Saxum: believe so,

Allen Hall: yeah. we’d love to have you. it’s an open invite. You can come and go as you wish, and we’ll see everybody here back next week. and thanks to all the listeners and everybody on YouTube. Our, listenership is just exploding and we appreciate everybody who’s listening and we’re trying to bring you all the latest news and technology around wind industry.

Around the wind industry and we appreciate everybody contributing and sending us notes, including Derek Rutherford. So thanks Derek, for sending us a couple notes here about what’s happening in wind and we’ll see you here. Next week on the Uptime Wind Energy [00:32:00] Podcast.

https://weatherguardwind.com/two-piece-blades/

Continue Reading

Renewable Energy

How Is U.S. Insanity Affecting Tourism?

Published

on

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

There are at two factors at play here:

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

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

How Is U.S. Insanity Affecting Tourism?

Continue Reading

Renewable Energy

Commercial Solar Solutions: Real Case Studies by Cyanergy

Published

on

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s get into it!

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

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

Commercial solar systems typically include:

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

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

Why Australian Businesses Are Turning to Solar Now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 Proven Solutions Through Real Case Studies by Cyanergy

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

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

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

Key Results

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

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

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

Why This Matters?

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

2. Sparacino Farms: Where Agriculture Meets Solar Innovation!

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

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

Project Highlights

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

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

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

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

3. Philter Brewing: Crafting Sustainability

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

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

Project Impact

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

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

4. Uniplas Mouldings International: Heavy Industry Solar Success

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

Project Features

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

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

Beyond Case Studies: Cyanergy’s Approach to Commercial Solar

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

1. Customized System Design

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

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

2. Financial Optimization

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

3. End-to-End After-Sale Support

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

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

4. Monitoring and Reporting

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

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

The Transformative Role of Solar in Business Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

Takeaway Thoughts

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

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

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

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

Your Solution Is Just a Click Away

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

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

Continue Reading

Renewable Energy

Inside ATT and SSE’s Faskally Safety Leadership Centre

Published

on

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Inside ATT and SSE’s Faskally Safety Leadership Centre

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

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

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

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

Mark Patterson: Thank you.

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

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

Dermot Kerrigan: Just Yeah,

Allen Hall: yeah. Six months

Dermot Kerrigan: ago.

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

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

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

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

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

Speaker: Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uh, it’s really simple messaging. Um,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Allen Hall: right? Yes.

Mark Patterson: Because you know,

Allen Hall: you remember that.

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

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

Allen Hall: Yeah.

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

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

And,

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

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

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

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

Allen Hall: then everything’s fine,

Dermot Kerrigan: then everything’s fine.

Allen Hall: Yes.

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

Allen Hall: yeah, it didn’t work.

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

It’s everybody’s business.

Allen Hall: Right.

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

Which is a lifting cage.

Allen Hall: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Allen Hall: Wow.

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

Allen Hall: Right. It’s a complicated

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

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

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

Allen Hall: No.

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

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

Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah. Um,

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

Dermot Kerrigan: No, absolutely not.

Allen Hall: No reports, nothing.

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

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

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

Dermot Kerrigan: No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Allen Hall: Mm-hmm.

Dermot Kerrigan: Because you were there,

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

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

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

Allen Hall: right?

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

Allen Hall: Sure. It’s

Dermot Kerrigan: saying it’s a,

Allen Hall: it’s a Greek tragedy

Dermot Kerrigan: in

Allen Hall: some

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

Allen Hall: slight

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

Allen Hall: right.

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

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

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

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

Allen Hall: people.

Mark Patterson: Absolutely. And

Allen Hall: yes,

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

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

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

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

Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah.

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

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

Mark Patterson: I think

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah.

Allen Hall: Those things just

Dermot Kerrigan: don’t need to practice.

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

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

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

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

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

Dermot Kerrigan: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

Allen Hall: right?

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

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

Allen Hall: right?

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

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

Allen Hall: right.

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

Allen Hall: Right.

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

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

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

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

Mark Patterson: Yeah.

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

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

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

Allen Hall: Yes,

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

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

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

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

So,

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

Dermot Kerrigan: No, absolutely.

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

Dermot Kerrigan: no, it’s not

Allen Hall: stuck in time.

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

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

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

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

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

A refresh of that is always good.

Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excellent, excellent training. Thanks, Alan. Thanks.

Inside ATT and SSE’s Faskally Safety Leadership Centre

Continue Reading

Trending

Copyright © 2022 BreakingClimateChange.com