• • • EDITOR’S INTERVIEW • • •
novices to seasoned professionals and will meet the demands of the ever-evolving electrical industry. “With the expansion of courses into the high voltage sector, we will be able to ensure continual growth in this space, allowing for a whole new generation of professionals to benefit from the wealth of knowledge that our trainers have gained throughout their illustrious careers.” The new high voltage centre features a number of circuit breakers and switchboards ranging in age and types, from 1,000V to 33,000V. Mr Murray said: “We’ve strategically built it this
way, so we’ve got high voltage authorisations, low voltage authorisations, isolations between high voltage sites, low voltage sites, high voltage to high voltage isolations, and we’ve tried to mix it up, so it captures all aspects of what anyone could need.” The Hornbill Industrial Training Centre opening event welcomed 100 people to the facility, which included engineers from blue chip companies, as well as businesses in the renewable and energy sectors.
“It was amazing to see the amount of people welcomed through the doors,” Mr Murray said. “To be honest, they’d be in the same sort of situations as us, with having to sending their staff to Slough or Middlesborough to get their authorisations done.
“Our aim is to bring training to Wales; until we opened this facility, there wasn’t an HV training centre in Wales, and I don’t think there ever has been. The centre will not just train our guys, but anybody else that needs training.”
Mr Murray said he’s hoping to get 100 people through the centre a month. “The five-day senior authorised person (SAP) course, the three-day refresher course and the five- day 33,000V course can each have up to 12 candidates on them,” he said. “Course lengths range from one-day courses to five-day courses. “It won’t just be an HV centre, we’ll also be inviting in LV engineers, the domestic and industrial electricians, to the centre to do their authorisations.”
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Walking around the centre, Mr Murray showed me a remote switching panel that opens and closes circuit breakers. “The danger of closing any circuit breaker is that if there’s any fault on it, and the arc explodes, it’s likely that the engineer will be hurt,” he said. “We’ve designed a remote switching panel that mimics the board.”
Mr Murray demonstrated closing the circuit breaker from the control panel.
“It removes the danger away from people operating it,” he said. “and we can also see the breaker going into circuit earth. It demonstrates that you can be away from the panel and still remotely open it and remotely close it – and be safely away from the switchgear if anything was to happen.”
Next on my tour of the facility was the jointing and termination bay. “There will be different types of terminations that we’re going to be doing and different types of joints
we have,” Mr Murray said. “If you’re extending a cable, or if there’s a fault, we have to put a sectional length in and this what candidates learn to do. “The termination area demonstrates the different types of terminations; they’ll be given a bay and taught how to strip back cables and there’s lots to know about the different types of the cable makeup. People will learn how to strip it down, join them together, protect them and the HV termination.”
The business also employs earthing designers in-house, who will teach candidates to work in interactions, crimping and lugging, and testing the earth’s resistivity. From September, Hornbill Industrial Training will offer courses around relays – how to test relays, how to programme them, and how to get the most out of them. “We’re also going to be doing photovoltaic training and testing fans and pumps,” Mr Murray said. “It’s a big centre that offers so much.” Upstairs in the centre are two lecture rooms. Once candidates have received their practical training, they’ll complete an online assessment, which is EAL accredited.
Looking ahead, Mr Murray said that a lot of people that will be trained in the centre will be new to the sector. “A lot of the people will want to be SAPs,” he
said. “The footfall will be huge and will help the skills shortage as we can’t find people that are already HV trained. “We either get standard electricians and train them in HV ourselves – there’s a huge skill shortage across Wales. There’s a huge skill shortage of high voltage trained engineers. “The advantage of our own centre is we can easily get them into us. We’re doing everything in-house so we can to train people a lot quicker. “To me, the upskilling of engineers in Wales, and the wide UK, is a big thing that we need to do; we’re ambitious and proud of what we’ve achieved.”
ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING • MAY 2023 13
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