Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | JANUARY 2021 | 39 Operational Excellence T he need for companies to adopt robust and tailored health and safety policies to protect employees and ensure compliance with regulations is paramount in utilities. Risks are heightened by the fact that many of those employed in the sector work remotely, maintaining and upgrading essential but ageing assets and infrastructure. Against this backdrop, new "wearable" and "smart" technol- ogy connected to cloud-based ser- vices is emerging to better monitor the amount of time workers spend in hazardous areas, improve the prediction to exposure, and help boost productivity by ensuring devices are working properly, for example, and thus reduce down time. Connected hardware and so• - ware enables managers to track the safety status of workers, allowing faster response to incidents. This might be as a result of "threat read- ings", alarms, man-down alerts and compliance status. A logical starting point for adopting connectivity is in gas detection, where cloud-based so• - ware services such as MSA's Safety io Grid Fleet Manager can help to improve worker health and safety, free up management time and enhance and enhancing productiv- ity. Safety io Grid Fleet Manager can also help streamline health and safety compliance procedures, monitor that correct procedures are being followed and in doing so help establish the correct health and safety culture. Portable gas detectors are essential equipment in the utility tool box because of the natural occurrence of gas during a num- ber of treatment processes and scenarios that utility workers will „ nd themselves in, such as sewer management and water manage- ment facilities, and maintaining and upgrading infrastructure for gas, electricity and water. Toxic gases include carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulphide (known as sewer gas), methane and oxygen de„ ciency. Where compliance requires issuing workers with gas detectors, these must be calibrated and ready for the job. Keeping up to date with compliance manually can be time consuming when a health and safety manager could be dealing with more strategic issues; it's not unusual for larger utility compa- nies to have 2,500 to 3,000 gas detectors to maintain. Safety io Grid Fleet Manager is a cloud-based service that allows companies to e' ciently and proactively manage " eets of MSA portable gas detectors. Managers can access " eet information remotely and share reports on activities like calibra- tions, detector records or alarms. Grid Fleet Manager also allows managers to: • Determine whether gas detec- tors are ready for work (including calibrated and bump tested, and with sensors working properly). • Proactively decommission any equipment that requires mainte- nance. • Assess risks – through analysis of data which identi„ es gas haz- ards workers are exposed to • Understand if the devices are being properly used and operated. Utilities companies will want to make sure their workers are safe and ensure that they are compli- ant. Safety io Grid Fleet Manager service can help utility companies achieve those goals. For more information please go to https://www.safetyio.com/ demo/ An in-depth report on this topic can be downloaded at: https:// utilityweek.co.uk/utility-week- explains-how-connected-technol- ogy-can-help-to-improve-health- and-safety/ DANNY STRANKS, INDUSTRIAL SALES MANAGER, MSA AND EUROPEAN PRODUCT LEAD, SAFETY IO How connectivity can help to improve health and safety Tech Talk Sponsored content brought to you by „ nds the best way to ful„ l these require- ments while also generating value in the complex and confusing energy market. The challenge for heating is similar, only there are many more variables: "Each house is di› erent. The fabric is di› erent. Its expo- sure to sunlight is di› erent. There's a whole series of factors that will a› ect how the tem- perature changes within that property." He says Kaluza has been using arti„ cial intelligence and machine learning to develop algorithms that can build physical models of customers' homes, down to the heat capac- ity of each room, and predict how they will respond to di› erent situations and actions. "It's a more evolved problem, but we've been doing this for quite a few years, starting with storage heaters. We've got a lot of expe- rience in it. We've got quite a good under- standing of those physical models and how temperature behaves as you start to tweak certain parameters." However, he adds: "There's a lot to do to make a marketplace that is really fair and creates the right environment for residen- tial " exibility to truly " ourish without being inhibited by any barriers." Smart meters Despite his reservations about the role of smart meters, Maher-McWilliams says the slow progress of the rollout and delays to the accompanying settlement arrangements are nevertheless a big obstacle to progress. "All of this stu› is underpinned by smart metering; having that smart meter data we can use to half-hourly settle customers, so when they shi• their demand around it does actually create some „ nancial value in the wholesale markets. "Ovo Energy and other suppliers have led the way in elective half-hourly settlement but we really need to complete the smart meter rollout swi• ly… and then follow that up with market-wide half-hourly settlement that cre- ate the right underlying incentives for cus- tomers who o› er their " exibility." None of this has been helped by the coro- navius pandemic, which has sucked up time and resources and put the brakes on the smart meter rollout for months on end. Maher-McWilliams says it has similarly been "a bit of a stop-start year" for Kaluza. He says the expansion of its portfolio has stalled somewhat in 2020 but it is hoping to make up lost ground once the UK rolls out its vaccination programme at su' cient scale. "At the moment, we're at the hundreds of kilowatts scale but we've shown the ability to grow that quite rapidly," he says. Tom Grimwood, energy editor "People talk about hydrogen but I think we can't delay cracking on with what exists and works today."

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