New onshore wind group to champion workforce health and safety

A new health and safety group for the onshore wind sector, SafetyOn, has been officially launched today at the RenewableUK Wind & Emergency Response Conference which is taking place in Birmingham.

Nineteen onshore wind organisations have come together to establish SafetyOn which aims to place health and safety at the forefront of all onshore wind activity and development. It is a not-for-profit, member-led collaboration that brings together industry leaders, health and safety experts, regulators and supply chain organisations throughout the UK, and will be facilitated by the Energy Institute providing project management and secretariat.


The group will provide visibility about the sector's health and safety performance, as well as assisting industry stakeholders to ensure key emerging risks are mitigated through co-operation and shared learnings.

David Armour, Natural Power's Director of HSEQ chairs the SafetyOn technical committee, and Stephen Trotter, Managing Director is on the leadership board. He said: "As industry leaders we are required to look beyond our legal obligations and ensure that our moral responsibility drives us to keep our employees, subcontractors and anyone else affected by our activities, safe. We do this through personal involvement in health and safety, by setting the right tone and high standards, and by ensuring that our organisation always look to learn and improve. I am delighted that at Natural Power we are playing such an active role in this important initiative.

"By coming together as an industry through SafetyOn, we can demonstrate not only our collective commitment to safety but our willingness to work together, share knowledge, expertise and learning to identify opportunities that further reduce and manage health and safety risks in the right areas, allowing the onshore wind industry to build on its existing high standards. We are already seeing this through the focus on working under suspended loads, integrated onshore emergency response and switchgear and transformer safety."

Lindsay McQuade, SafetyOn Chair and ScottishPower Renewables Chief Executive said: "The Onshore wind sector is a story of success in the UK - its delivered investment of £35bn, employs thousands and underpins the UK's position as a leader in decarbonisation. With that success comes the responsibility to ensure that every single employee has a safe and healthy working environment. I'm delighted to see the industry coming together to form SafetyOn to support this ambition.

"Over the next year I will be working with industry leaders to ensure that the message of health and safety is at the heart of the onshore wind renewable industry."

SafetyOn's primary objective for 2019 is to develop a means of collecting industry wide health and safety performance data and statistical analysis of industry trends to drive empirical decision making in areas of health and safety mprovement.

Other key good practice work programmes include switchgear safety in the wind industry, integrated onshore emergency response and working under suspended loads.

The founding members of the SafetyOn group are:
• Banks Renewables
• EDF Renewables
• E.ON Climate & Renewables UK
• Enercon Services UK Ltd
• Energy Institute
• Fred Olsen Renewables
• GE Energy (UK) Ltd
• Innogy Renewables UK Ltd
• Natural Power
• Nordex Acciona Windpower
• Renewable Energy Systems Ltd
• RenewableUK
• Senvion UK Ltd
• Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Ltd
• SSE Renewables

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