Workplace safety is the utmost target for operations since unsafely working may cause losses of lives and assets as well as have an effect on the environment and employee’s health. Therefore, creating a work safety culture to proactively prevent accidents must be carried out and improve continuously for example, creating a safe working environment, establishing clear preventive measures, evaluating performances, promoting knowledges and raising awareness, as well as drawing participations from all employees and stakeholders.
The safe workplace environment is counted as the human rights of which employees, contractors and those working in the areas should get sufficiently and equally. In addition, promoting employee participation in expressing their ideas to improve their workplace environment will finally help in creating their contributions, encouragements, and engagements with the organizations.
BPP has focused on cultivating a safety culture within the organization with the ‘3 ZEROs’ target as followings:
BPP organized the work-safety promotion activities, for example:
- Measuring the workplace environment and making it safe.
- Training and testing on safety and environment, safety rules and risks in the areas prior to working, as well as strictly reviewing them at a defined time.
- Promoting working safety and regularly inspecting a workplace by top management.
- Conducting safety inspections carried out by employees, supervisors and safety officers during operations.
- Setting up the safety improvement committee for offices and power plants.
- Communicating with involved parties to raise safety awareness through various activities, such as emails games and posters, etc.
- Exercising the emergency plans by simulating various scenarios regularly.
- Providing incentives for safe working, such as special rewards for contractors having outstanding safety practices, celebrations on common achievements, etc.
BPP has provided the health promotions for its employees such as:
- Conducting a health check-up for employees in accordance with the COVID-19 preventive measure strictly and preparing health insurances for medical treatments and coordinating for the provision of COVID-19 vaccines for our employees.
- Conducting an annual health check-up and a physical fitness measurement based on risks arising from a nature of work for the employees.
- Measuring working conditions in both offices and production units, and frequently improving and standardizing working conditions.
- Promoting exercising and maintaining good health among employees, such as setting up sports clubs, providing health related knowledges, including providing an individual exercise trainer for interested staff, etc.
- Arranging the physiological consultation project called RelationFlip for employees so that they can consult with the externally experienced physiologists on both personal life and working matters in order to relieve their stresses. Additionally, all employees’ personal information will be kept confidential.
- Conducting the online doctor visit program for employees, allowing them to make an appointment with and being preliminarily diagnosed by the doctor via the online system. By this way, the doctors can prescribe medicines and deliver them to the staff quickly.
- Organizing the Flexible Benefit project, of which THB 12,000 financial support is annually provided for each employee who can utilize this financial support for other benefits, including their health such as additional medical treatment’ s expenses, sports club membership fees and equipment costs to facilitate working from homes with a right physical way, etc.
Located in Shijiazhuang City, Zhengding County, Hebei Province, People’s Republic of China, Zhengding CHP Plant has a total installed capacity of 139 MWs and produces approximately 10 million Gigajoules (GJ) of heat per year, contributed for users in Zhengding County where around 58,000 residents and more than 180 of the industrial sector, trades and others are living. It is the only power plant producing heat supplied for a centralized heating system in the area, which is essential to residents during winter when the average outdoor temperatures are around 0.3 Celsius.
Zhengding Power Plant has tried to stabilize its heat transmissions and improve the safety by installing equipment and establishing a real-time remoted monitoring system applied to the heat exchange station in order to replace staff visits to the station area, reducing risks and operating times from entering the station zone. More importantly, it has made it possible to quickly detect abnormalities so that they can be corrected immediately, including increasing the power plant’s stability of heat supplies.
The installation of intelligent thermal inspection and control equipment includes:
- Remotely inspecting via video cameras
- Remotely controlling and adjusting the water pump’s recirculation frequencies.
- Remotely controlling and adjusting the steam and hot water flows intensity in the heat exchanger station.
- Employing the information collection system related to pressures and temperatures from various devices in the system such as water pumps, pressure regulator valves, water tanks, etc.
This project implementation has enabled Zhengding CHP Plant to reduce the number of employees inspecting the heat exchanger station from 200 persons to 40 persons, reducing the employee safety risks derived from being exposed to noises and heats and the electricity costs by 18.4%, or CNY 864,000 per annum. When assessing this project’s safety with the Social Return on Investment (SROI), the project has generated values of approximately CNY 5.67 million.
In addition, Zhengding CHP Plant has also upgraded its heating equipment to accommodate thermal generations in accordance with the growing populations in Zhengding County. The plant has also improved its equipment inspections, including developing and exercising the emergency plans. As a result, the plant has been certified by the ISO 45001 Occupational Health and Safety Management System continuously. This has made the power plant to operate stably and safely. There were no working accidents while the availability factor was maintained at a high level of 94.04%. More importantly, the power plant was bestowed the Advanced Unit of Central Heating award from the government sector.
Typically, a power plant needs to be planned for maintenance so that the machines can continue operating. The maintenance planning is conducted by the maintenance department, which will proceed the documentations specifying work details, persons working in the area, operational periods and risk assessments to the production department to consider and cut off some working systems so as for safe operations of the maintenance department.
However, there are too many of such documents, which must be sent to different departments for inspections, such as the production and safety units, etc. This has resulted in document losses during operations. Additionally, these documents must be used together by many parties, making it inconvenient and difficult to access risk details of each maintenance. Or if the document is lost, it will not be able to trace back.
Luannan CHP Plant, therefore, has developed the Double Control application to replace all documental operations. In the form of digital, the Double Control application allows relevant parties to create documents requested for approval, giving approval and checking the data simultaneously. It also prevents document losses, making maintenance operations go smoothly while operators stay safe from working. Around 50% of time was also saved. When assessing this project result relating to safety with the Social Return on Investment (SROI) tool, the value of about CNY 104,800 was estimated from this project. The value was gauged from time-saving, enhancing employee’s knowledge, keeping documents for legal retrospection and securities arisen from using this application This was exclusive of the value from project expansion to other BPP’s power plants.
In the past year, Luannan CHP Plant had no major working accidents and has consistently accredited by the Occupational Health and Safety Management System (ISO 45001). Moreover, the plant was selected as the outstanding occupational health enterprises. It was awarded as the outstanding prefectural workers’ vanguard from the government sector as well.
To prevent accidents possibly occurring during unloading coal from the vessels, BLCP Power Plant has applied the AI Vision to detect and alert contractors and employees when they are operating on coal vessels and bulldozers, which have limited visibility and environmental conditions, such as field of vision, hearing noises, etc. Using the AI Vision will help in identifying the characteristics of people and machines, safe operating distances as well as immediately alerting the operators when the distance between the local operator and the machine is closer than the safe distance. This can significantly reduce the risks involved with working accidents.
