The wind industry deepening commitment to safety training as it builds-out its international fleet has been spotlighted in the latest report from the Global Wind Organisation (GWO), with the not-for-profit sector body seeing a near 20% rise in the workforce worldwide accredited with its standards and a network of training providers expanded almost 30% larger.

But GWO CEO Jakob Holst said while training was paramount to improving safety on wind farms, there remained a need for a cultural shift “from the top-down” that empowered technicians to work at a “safe pace” and to report problems when they are spotted.

“This is something we are going to have to do better at addressing – standarised training is part of it but also a system for starting work [as a technician] knowing you have been given the time to do things right the first time,” he said, speaking with Recharge.

“It is about giving technicians the confidence and competencies to say ‘stop’ if they see something wrong – that’s a mentality change. Standardised training helps from the ground-up. But must all must come from the top-down too, from management,” Holst continued . “I am optimistic. Our members do want to make a positive change.”

Holst said the figures underlined that the wind industry’s recognition of the importance of standardised training reflect the “hard reality [that] we put people in harm’s way and sometimes things go wrong”.

Yet he added there was “still a disconnect between the biggest players and the subcontactors” that did not take full account of the fact that “efficiencies and cost reduction are putting enormous pressure on our work force”.

“We have to allow for more time to do the job right the first time,” said Holst, noting that a “globally benchmarked system” for the different classes of safety breach – including lost-time incidents – was key.

“We need an alignment on how we interpret and collect and categorise incident data, sharing of root cause and analysis, and about creating training and competency frameworks across the industry so that it does not matter if an employee works for [company] ‘a’, ‘b’ or ‘c’, they will be receive the same level of training,” he said.

Through a new initiative called Safety Without Borders, announced in tandem with the report, GWO’s sixteen sector OEMs and owner-operators aim to respond to the “growing international understanding that it is important we standardise training to minimise this [global inconsistency of training],” he said.

Holst noted: “Local stakeholders are going through our standards and globalising them and this reflects that a ‘wind turbine is a wind turbine is a wind turbine’ and you can do standardised training that makes sense anywhere it is needed. Look at the employment figures – 1 million turbine technicians globally all working on ‘a turbine’.”

Safety Without Borders has set out the long-term target of better than doubling the GWO-trained global workforce in the next three years from 90,000 in almost 200 countries to 200,000 to “bring best practice developed in Europe to the worldwide workforce”.

“By the end of 2022, we want to see more than double the number of people in the GWO trained workforce, reaching 200,000 people,” said Eloy Jauregui, safety director at Acciona Energía and GWO chair.

The latest GWO report highlights that worldwide adoption of standardised training continues to “accelerate”, from take-up of over 14,292 GWO-standard courses – equal to 12% of the global total – outside Europe in 2017, to almost 40,000 – 21% of the global total – in 2019, and that there has been a steady “organic growth” of such training, with volumes of basic safety modules rising by 17.2% last year to a total of 176,764.

Jauregui stated: “In the short time since GWO was formed, global standards for safety and technical training have embedded into the wind industry’s supply chain.

“Now, we take a significant step forward by announcing GWO members’ long-term ambitions in the form of a three-year strategy, called Safety Without Borders. This strategy unifies every strand of work GWO does and places a target ahead of us to establish globally accepted and standardised training in all wind markets.”