Near-perfect health and safety milestones achieved

A strong safety culture is at the heart of achieving industry-leading performance in Health and Safety, with what is recognised as a ‘near perfect’ rating by industry standards, reports BTE Renewables. The company announced that during its 2022 year of operations, only one injury was recorded across all its projects sites, with nearly 800 000 hours worked – most certainly an astounding achievement!

“This exhibits our commitment to ensuring that all employees returned home safely to their families every day, which is our ethos and in our DNA,” said Robert Skjodt, CEO of BTE Renewables.

The renewable energy sector is generally considered to be a safe environment, however, workers still face occupational threats, many of which are universal to other power generation facilities.

The Total Recordable Injury Frequency Rate (TRIFR) is an indicator of the state of health and safety at any workplace and provides an idea about the organisation’s efforts to protect the workers from work-related hazards. In the case of BTE Renewables, it accounts for a single medical case that occurred in 2022, over the nearly 800,000 hours worked, across six power plants in South Africa and Kenya, which is considered to be exceedingly low, by both local and international standards.

This is one of the best health and safety milestones the company has ever achieved since the projects’ each entered commercial operations and exceeds both the company’s target and what is recognised as ‘near perfect’ by industry standards.

‘We weren’t afraid to make drastic changes and committed financially to enable us to modernise our approach, which included moving to a ‘Brother’s Keeper’ approach across all our sites instead of policing by management approach,” explained Leticia Vos, Senior Health and Safety Manager at BTE Renewables.

She concluded, saying, “We have had a proactive approach to effectively mitigating, and continually improving, plus we don’t allow non-conformance to our health and safety procedures, policies or any legislative requirements and are committed to continually improving our systems of operation, keeping our TRIFR as low as possible during our operations, so that we can nurture our ‘Brother’s Keeper’ culture where we genuinely care for each other.”