BUSINESS UNITS: Regulated Networks
OUR DECISION TO PUT SAFETY FIRST:// Sometimes leadership is about making unpopular decisions but for the right reasons. Our commitment to keeping our people safe has challenged tradition in the interests of safety. For decades, network workers have undertaken repairs and upgrades on lines that are energised. The thinking was always that the work could be done within acceptable risk standards and that keeping the power on was best for the customer. But the lead up to, and passing of, new health and safety legislation in 2015 saw us reconsidering what it meant to keep people safe in this day and age. It led us to a New Zealand first: the decision to turn off power, wherever possible, whenever we are working on the lines, first with our high voltage network and then, a year later, with our low voltage network as well. Today, our line mechanics start every job knowing that in most circumstances work will be done de-energised. Yet making this change happen was no simple procedural switch. In fact, shifting such an entrenched way of working meant fundamentally changing not just how our own people were used to working but also our internal safety systems and processes. To ensure we got it right, we considered safety procedures in Australia and the UK, worked closely with our staff and with our field service providers Northpower and Electrix, rewrote major systems and policies and created a risk assessment matrix that has an automated scoring system heavily weighted towards health and safety to ensure consistent decision-making.
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for ourselves and as a signal to others. We are currently discussing all of this with the Commerce Commission. It’s encouraging to see the Electricity Engineers voltage overhead work as a “substantial hazard”. Our view is that regulators now need to recognise and adjust for the flow-on implications for our performance targets and cost structures, both of which are based on historic data and practices. Association has since issued a new guideline that categorises high
Now, live-line work only accounts for a fraction of what it used to. The decision hasn’t been without commercial consequences — or pushback. We received a lot of resistance from other utilities over the decision, and inevitably our customers will continue to incur, direct costs as a result of breaching agreed quality targets as well as missing out on incentive payments. The switching required to work this way has also meant costs have increased, jobs take longer and there is more wear and tear on equipment. But the balance for us is that our people are now working in safer working conditions and we believe this was necessary experience more outages. We have incurred, and will
LINE MECHANIC WORKING ON DE-ENERGISED HIGH VOLTAGE LINES.
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