I found this story and graph on how much wind energy is being generated across Australia and around the world recently for electricity extremely interesting. I was surprised to read how from August 10 to August 18 South Australia created 47 percent of the overall electricity requirements from wind energy. The story goes on to say that during the same period 7.6% of the entire wholesale demand in the National Electricity Market was generated by wind energy.
Read the full story here
Last month we signed up our fifth wind energy project, the Repower Bald Hills project to use contractor management software, I wanted to share why wind farms are using contractor management software. Recent wind energy projects for our contractor management software include
- Meridian Makara Wind Farm in Wellington, NZ, construction build over 3 years to manage thousands of contractor and staff attendance transactions.
- Meridian Raglan Wind Farm in Hamilton, NZ, construction build over 2 years to manage thousands of contractor and staff attendance transactions.
- Meridian Mill Creek Wind Farm construction build over the last 6 months with 2 years to go, to manage thousands of contractor and staff attendance transactions.
- Downer EDI/Meridian Mt Waverley Wind Farm in Victoria, Australia, construction build over the last 6 months with 2 years to go, to manage contractor and staff attendance transactions.
- Repower Bald Hills will consist of 52 wind turbines, each with an electricity generating capacity of 2.05 megawatts (MW) giving the project a total capacity of 106.6MW
Wind farms have a unique challenge as each onshore wind farm often covers vast distances. Managing contractors across such vast distances 10, 15, 20 and more than 30klms presents many challengers and can only really be managed today with a combination of fixed kiosks and mobile phone technology, mobile phone technology is playing a large role in collecting data over such large distances. Giving contractors the ability to check in and out of access points from their mobile phone or via a fixed kiosk at specific locations across the wind farm allows for better collection of data.
How can a Contractor Management system help you with your situation?
- Pre Induction – even before your project starts right from the very beginning you can start to capture the details online from contractors wishing to be involved with your project. Creating a pre induction allows you to immediately start electronically organising potential contractors for your projects
- On site Induction – Once you have selected the contractors you need for your project from the pre induction results you can complete further onsite inductions both physical and electronic in preparation for the contractors commencing work
- Set up automatic denial of access warnings alerting your health and safety team that contractors inductions, licences, insurances have expired
- Know where your contractors are at any one time by setting up physical and virtual access points across your entire location allowing contractors to confirm exactly where they are across the entire distance of your wind farm
- Easily complete evacuation reporting no matter how much distance covers your wind farm
- Create excellent monthly reports giving you total hours worked
- Register all visitors as well as contractors to your location for the duration of your project
- Manage multiple locations no matter where they are around the world.
Global wind power capacity is certainly growing making wind power a serious alternative for the future. I found this interesting graph showing the increasing capacity of wind power around the globe.
Do you need to manage contractors across large distances? Give us a call on 1300 800 077 to discuss your requirements. Watch a short video