Health and Safety for Senior Managers

Is it really worth the Senior Manager improving H&S knowledge?

• a strong lead comes from the top, nobody lower down the management ladder believe that their efforts viz. spending more time, energy, money; will be positively recognised or thanked.
• H&S is not a ‘favourite’ subject, it is often considered obvious - but we are not born with the knowledge of workplace risks or controls and how to manage them.
• World-wide studies show that no health and safety system will function effectively without support from the top. All efforts is likely to be wasted.

Causes of Incidents

Incidents are direct result of unsafe acts or conditions.

Unsafe Acts

• Working without authority.
• Failure to warn others of danger
• Using dangerous equip.
• Using wrong equipment
• Failure to issue control measures
• Horseplay etc.

Unsafe Conditions

• Inadequate or missing machine guards.
• Defective tools or equipment
• Fire Hazards
• Ineffective housekeeping
• Excessive noise
• Poor ventilation and lighting etc.

Health and Safety Management

Systematic use of techniques to identify and remove hazards, the control of risks which remain, and the use of techniques to influence the behaviour and encourage safe attitudes. This is the primary responsibility of management.

Practical Objectives of Safety Management

• Gain support from all concerned for the health and safety effort
• Motivate, educate and train – to enable recognition of hazards
• Achieve hazard control by design and purchasing
• Support inspection system to provide feedback
• Ensure hazard control principles form part of supervisory training
• Devise and introduce controls based on risk assess.
• Comply with regulations and standards

Energy Storage- Shaving load peaks from the substation

Welcome to the future of bulk electricity storage. American Electric Power (AEP) installed a 1.2-MW sodium sulfur (NaS) battery and accompanying inverter (Figure 1) at the Charleston Substation of its subsidiary, Appalachian Power. The Charleston Substation was chosen to host the installation for several reasons related to economics, service reliability, and local load growth.

The main function of the system is to supply up to 7.2 MWh of electrical energy on demand for peak-shaving purposes. However, it also has a business purpose. According to AEP, the system will enable deferment of equipment upgrades to the Charleston substation for six or seven years, at which time the battery can be relocated to another substation and play similar roles there. The battery's manufacturer—NGK Insulators Ltd. of Japan—expects the battery to last for 15 years, assuming that it will be charged and discharged 4,000 to 5,000 times up to 90% of its full capacity.

In addition to using the battery system to shave demand peaks, AEP envisions employing it to accumulate and store for subsequent dispatch electrical energy generated by intermittent generating units such as wind turbines and solar cells. The name given to the system—the Distributed Energy Storage System (DESS)—implies that it will have many applications on the utility's T&D grids. "Our goal is to deploy plenty of distributed energy storage capacity on our grids over the next decade," said AEP Program Manager Ali Nourai. "We intend to have a very resilient system that can absorb customer-operated distributed generation capacity as it connects to our grid."

AEP and several other U.S. utilities are currently field-testing a variety of distributed energy storage systems. Although the Charleston battery project (which cost about $2,000/kW) was slightly more expensive than upgrading the substation's components to handle higher loads, the system is expected to deliver many intangible benefits, including invaluable and unique operating experience.

The project was partially funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories. Sandia will closely monitor the system's performance during the first year of service and produce detailed reports that will help other potential users of energy storage better understand the costs and benefits of using bulk storage to prop up a grid being stressed by peak demand.

AEP chose the NaS battery system for its very high power density and its operating experience in Japan. Over the past decade, NGK and the battery's co-developer, Tokyo Electric Power Co., have deployed in their home country NaS batteries totaling 150 MW of capacity.

source: powermag.com

Arc flash protection

Arc flash is arguably the most deadly and least understood hazard faced daily by plant personnel. Research indicates that even the best safety plan, training regimen, and protective equipment may be no match for the heat and blast effects of an arc flash. Consider this article a wakeup call to retrofit every switchgear cubicle in your plant with a properly designed remote racking system. Forewarned is forearmed.
read full story>>

Debate Between SriSri Ravisankar and Dr. Zakir Naik on "Concept of God"-Watch Video

The debate held at Banglore on the topic "Concept of God"
between Sri Sri Ravisankar, the founder of 'Art of Living' and respected by millions of people as a God and Dr.Zakir Naik, the great Islamic scholar.

Watch video

part1 part2 part3

AMD launches chipset for Intel chips

AMD announced a chipset for Intel processors. It is an integrated chipset based on RS690 and its Xpress 1250 graphic core can run Vista aero glass just fine.

The chipset supports Intel Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Extreme, Intel Pentium 4, Pentium D, Pentium Extreme Edition, Celeron, and Celeron D processors and Front Side Bus (FSB) speeds 533, 800, and 1066MHz. It can address up to 16GB memory and has 128-bit dual channel memory interface. It supports a bunch of video acceleration stuff, such as Enhanced MPEG-2 hardware decode acceleration, which claims to dramatically reduce CPU use without incurring the cost of a full MPEG-2 decoder and provide the basis for platforms with H.264 support.

The chipset supports DVI/HDMI outs, HDCP 1.1, multiple displays, 10 USB 2.0 ports, ATA Gen 2 PHY support at 3.0GHz, four ports SATA AHCI controller with support for NCQ and slumber modes and many, many other things.