This mantra was the catalyst for three employees who developed a field invention that is now being used across the business to help ensure the safety of its employees.

‘Safetees’ a plastic plug resembling golf tees, helps electrical field workers identify the live parts of a circuit, highlighting unfinished areas of work, or marking incorrect wiring and open circuits.

This simple, effective and innovative invention was developed to meet CitiPower and Powercor’s need to reduce the number of outage incidents caused by test leads being inserted into the wrong panel terminals at zone substations.

Marking the circuit board with a colour-coded ‘Safetees’ has not only created a safer working environment for employees, it is also saving the company money.

Under the current regulatory regime, distribution businesses can incur penalties if equipment is damaged and outages occur as a result of incorrect test lead insertions.

The inventors of ‘Safetees’ were the 2008 winners of CitiPower and Powercor’s annual Business Innovation Cup, an internal competition to encourage and support innovative thinking and development.

Innovation Manager Nuria Ruiperez said the Business Innovation Cup was developed to offer employees the opportunity to see their good ideas come to fruition.

“There are a lot of creative people within our organisation that have terrific ideas inspired by their daily roles.

“The Business Innovation Cup is a vehicle to develop and realise these ideas. There is a significant cash prize incentive, along with the full support of the business to put these ideas to market.

“Safetees met an immediate business need that offered considerable safety benefits and cost savings.

“Safetees is already attracting a lot of interest from other distribution businesses and we encourage the use of Safetees across the industry, not only due to the cost saving, but more importantly for ensuring the health and safety of our workers,” she said.

Solar cities on trial

Another idea that was derived via CitiPower and Powercor’s innovation program, eighthgate, is Solar Citites.

The environment is a topic that our employees are passionate about and we understand that innovative thinking is required to meet future demands.

Continuing to forge innovative business, Powercor is participating in a sustainability flagship program.

The Solar Cities Programme is a $94 million Federal initiative designed to help communities change the way they think about and use energy.

There are several Solar cities underway in Australia and Powercor is a consortium member of the Central Victorian Solar City Project.

The program aims to demonstrate economic and environmental impacts of integrating cost-reflective pricing with the concentrated uptake of solar, energy efficiency and smart metering technologies; as well as identifying and implementing options for addressing barriers to distributed solar generation, energy efficiency and electrical demand management for grid connected urban areas.

We also view the Solar Cities as an opportunity to explore further possibilities in the environmental space as well as to better understand the energy needs of our customers

Work on the five year trial started last year and is expected to run until 2013.