Work Safety In The Wind Energy Sector: State Of The Art, Problems And Future Perspectives

Abstract

The wind sector is a relative “new” work activity, if we consider that in the national context the first power plants have been built in the mid-90s, and for this reason the main processing phases of the wind farm construction and management involve risks to the health and safety of workers not yet fully known and properly managed. Many researchers and safety professionals operate in this sector and search for solutions that could reconcile production efficiency with the need to mitigate the risks associated with the work, through the risk assessment and the identification of appropriate prevention and protection measures.
25 years after the first installations, the issue of the advancing age of wind energy technicians appears as one of the main risk factors so far little taken into consideration, and on which it is therefore necessary to intervene.
Our work focused on the identification of risk assessment criteria and on the search of innovative mitigation measures, through a methodology based on the work experiences we have lived in the Company in over 25 years of activity.
We have analyzed the current legislation, identifying gaps and the need for adjustments according to the emerging work needs, and explored the most recent evolutions of the technology, which provides increasingly sophisticated tools to guarantee a level of comfort and safety to workers that are involved in installing and doing maintenance at height on wind turbines which in the meantime in the last two decades have come to have nacelles mounted on towers over 100 meters high, with rotors over 150 meters in diameter and increasingly complex equipment to manage.
The result of our study demonstrates that the risk to health and safety deriving from the aging of technical personnel engaged in the wind energy sector can be correctly mitigated thanks to the targeted implementation of innovative tools made available by scientific and technological progress and through organizational models that take care of staff training and specific health surveillance protocols.
We have also highlighted that there are some gaps at the regulatory level that should be filled, in particular through the recognition of “strenuous work” for the technicians of the wind sector, and we continue to cooperate with the Institutions, also through our participation in the HSE Work Group (Health, Safety & Environment) established at the National Wind Energy Association (ANEV), so that these legislative adjustments can be achieved as soon as possible.