Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | JANUARY 2023 | 37 Pan-utility E mployees' tasks and roles in general are being improved in many ways thanks to arti cial intelligence (AI). I'd like to share my insights into the use of AI for managing the health and safety of the people within your organisation. When analysing an incident, injury, near miss or observation, some ndings simply can't be determined using the human eye alone. AI has the ability to analyse insights from tens of thousands of HSE records to recognise industry-speci c terminology and extract conclusions. Findings are then displayed, suggesting areas for improvement, and enabling professionals to be more proactive than reactive. COMET Signals uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to perform analysis on the free text description of incidents or events and determines insights such as key recurring topics or phrases, commonly occurring hazards, severity, and typical root cause categorisation. It highlights not just a mythical primary cause, but multiple causes spanning the entire organisational spectrum. These can be presented and correlated, displaying each category in order, and revealing trends. When combining these insights with some standard classi cation of the events, such as business area, or location, we can start to build some powerful views of the data and address underlying issues. AI allows your data to be tracked to show the frequency and timing of events per type, generating a comparison between periods, such as year on year. Once the data is mature, the AI can then be trained to become predictive by recognising previous insights, any actions taken and outcomes. This all sounds great. However, the insights that can be derived can only ever be as good as the underlying data provided. Once a QHSE (Quality, Health, Safety, and Environment) professional has seen what's possible, they will be determined that their company's record keeping is as good as it can be, without being onerous, to ensure that real value can be derived from that data. The alternative is that this data is potentially being wasted, as no real information can be gleaned from it, so you question what is being captured and why in the rst place. This is taking the application of AI in QHSE to a di‹ erent place, learning from previous events and experience, enabling teams to be proactive, and bene tting employees by mitigating serious incident risk before the bad event actually happens. COMET Signals forms part of STC INSISO's suite of COMET incident prevention tools. To nd out more, visit www.cometanalysis.com or email comet@stcinsiso.com MARK RUSHTON, CHIEF EXECUTIVE, STC INSISO Tech Talk Sponsored content brought to you by Using AI to manage health and safety Opinion Robert Birch Programmes and policy executive, Energy UK A new survey has shown 90% of Young Energy Professionals (YEPs) believe that the government is not doing enough to bring down energy bills in both the short and long term. In our report, Tomorrow's Ideas, Today: Resolving the Energy Trilemma, the Young Energy Professionals (YEP) Forum asked members about their thoughts on the energy tri- lemma: simultaneously achiev- ing a‹ ordability, sustainability, and security of supply. We focused on how well the government is delivering e‹ ective policy in these areas, highlighting best practice at a local, national, and interna- tional level, and asked what the YEPs believe the top priorities should be to achieve each pillar of the trilemma. Current price hikes are extremely concerning for customers and businesses alike, owing to the UK's dependence on the volatile international gas market. Low-carbon, domestic energy is now undoubtedly the cheapest and most geopo- litically secure option for our energy supply, therefore it is unsurprising that we call upon government to ramp up invest- ment in green energy while also focusing on demand reduction. Our main ndings are clear: the government is not doing enough across the board to protect consumers from energy price shocks in the short term, reduce gas demand to ensure long-term energy security, and above all, greater investment in energy e– ciency should be prioritised. The UK has an ageing hous- ing stock with some of the most expensive homes across Europe to heat, highlighting the need for a clear strategy to prioritise domestic energy e– ciency. Yet our survey showed that young people see no action being taken to x this fundamental issue, which addresses all three pillars of the trilemma and makes absolute sense, given the ongoing cost of living crisis. Our report highlights that 92% of respondents do not believe the government is prior- itising greater energy e– ciency in the short term, while 80% of those surveyed further believe that long-term energy e– ciency targets will not be met. The priorities set out are clear and re™ ect the wider issues: in the short term, YEPs support government interven- tion to protect consumers and those in fuel poverty. In the long term, importance is placed on investment in cheap renewables, building a successful, pro table, and future-proof energy market and establishing the necessary policy and infrastructure to reach net zero. The report also showcases the ambitions and motivations of young people who choose to work in the energy industry; those that participated in the survey want to become increas- ingly involved in the decision- making to meet net-zero targets. This becomes even more appar- ent with the fact that being able to contribute to reaching net zero was the number one reason that YEPs look at when deciding whether to take a job or not. Young people want to have their voice heard, have a seat at the table and contribute to the greater good. We can contribute to both the short and long-term solutions to the energy trilemma to build a reliable and future- proof energy system and, ulti- mately, implement energy policy that is committed to reaching sustainability targets. "Purpose is important: we want jobs that contribute to net zero"

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