By Kirsten Bank Christensen
Vice President, Group HSEQ, A2SEA A/S

STARTING POINTS

The offshore wind industry is growing and maturing at an impressive pace. With this pace comes considerable opportunity to improve on health and safety. But exactly what does it take to put safe working systems into play? And how can we build up experience, resources and training to establish safety as more than just an operational safeguard?

For offshore wind construction companies, on-board safety simply isn’t a choice – it’s an imperative. And while trying to eliminate every single industry risk may be unrealistic, management of such risks is critical. To actively improve their health and safety record, companies should first look to increase structure – perhaps defining operational standards across industries and borders, setting common training standards, and benchmarking safety practices. With these in place, they can benefit further from knowledge-sharing, encompassing learnings from serious incidents within the industry and even incidents from related industries.

Further, companies should look to leverage valuable, informed input from industry specialists who appreciate the complexities of real-life working conditions and who can take an outside-looking-in standpoint.

THE THREAT OF NEW ENTRANTS

As the industry continues to evolve, it’s also critical to embrace innovation – even where it initially challenges the status quo on ideas about safe operations. Much of this innovation is brought to the table by new entrants to the industry. However, the offshore wind market’s current influx of new entrants brings with it both opportunities and threats. Posing the greatest risks are entities with a strong desire to succeed, but
which have limited practical experience. Overzealous ambitions may tempt such companies to take chances that more experienced operators would avoid.

MANAGING RISK

To prevent risks escalating as the industry expands, we need to closely monitor practices and make standards available covering the technical, legal and operational aspects of health and safety for established players and new entrants alike. Such standards must be developed in cooperation with the leading operators in the business, capitalising on their accumulated experience and their familiarity with refining methodologies. For example, as one of the front-runners in offshore wind installation, A2SEA is keen to share useful knowhow about safety as well as key learnings from its practical experience.

STEEP LEARNING CURVE

The past decade has seen the industry climb a steep learning curve, overcoming challenges one after another. The development of standard procedures and guidelines, though still in its infancy, has been one of the most important achievements during this time, particularly so in the UK renewables sector where offshore turbines play a leading role. Here, the renewable energy trade association RenewableUK has partnered with influential stakeholders including utility companies, key contractors (including A2SEA), health and safety executives, and advisory bodies intent on achieving industry best practices for health and safety. The resulting standards cover training, safety rules, RISE (an industry database for severe incidents) and joint forums for ongoing standards development.

CROSS-INDUSTRY POLLINATION

Offshore renewables is still a young, relatively small industry transitioning from learning-bydoing towards a more structured approach. Part of this process involves incorporating expertise and advanced practices from other industries – such as oil and gas. Looking towards the future, we should improve cross-industry pollination, including adapting knowhow from industries that have wellestablished safety standards in areas such as operations or crew education. Parallel to this, better cross-border cooperation could help us work towards achieving a uniform approach to industry best practices.

NEW MARKETS, NEW DEMANDS

Utility companies, industry organisations and contractors all need to be familiar with local regulations, applicable legislation and industry standards. But entities expanding to new markets may well encounter sharp contrasts in offshore legislation, or sometimes the absence of any at all!

Sharing knowledge and exporting good practices, where guided by key contractors and operational specialists, should prove valuable in establishing uniform per formance standards for selected operations. These can then be expanded on and implemented as best practice guidelines or industry standards that go above and beyond legislation to proactively assist industry players across the board. It is these types of practices that, in the long run, will lift the overall level of offshore wind health and safety.

 

Like this post? Subscribe now and get notified about new content!