Posters

Abstract

The offshore wind industry (OWI) is a young and rapidly growing industry. Global installed capacity of offshore wind is expected to grow from 21.1 GW to 31.4 GW by 2026. The workforce is also forecast to increase rapidly, in the UK alone it is predicted to increase from around 15,000 direct jobs in 2021 to over 60,000 in 2030. In addition to this growth, the nature of the industry is also changing. Wind farms are moving into deeper waters, farther from shore. Wind turbines are also increasing in size, and new technologies such as floating wind turbines are being implemented. The rapid growth of the industry increases pressure on the supply chain to safely build, operate and maintain wind farms and could increase the risk of safety incidents. A key aspect of managing safety performance is understanding the performance of the industry and using data to identify trends and predict future performance. This paper assesses the current measures used to report safety performance, reviews the literature around key performance indicators (KPIs) and proposes potential improvements for the industry. The paper found that the OWI industry health and safety reporting is dominated by the use of lagging indicators. Lagging indicators such as total recordable incident rate (TRIR) report the rate of past incidents. They are widely used in many industries but recent research has indicated they have limited value in predicting future performance and are often reported to degrees of accuracy that are not statistically valid. There is a growing body of research around the use of leading indicators that attempt to measure the performance of a H&S programme and give indications of future risk of incidents without relying on incident rates. The paper reviewed this research and proposes the adoption of suitable leading indicators for the OWI.