Fuelcell energy inc. designs, manufactures, installs and services onsite power generators for schools, hotels, prisons, manufacturers, waste-water treatment plants and utilities around the world.
To produce electricity, its products can utilize a variety of fuel sources, including biofuels (for example, gases from landfills or food-processing operations), natural gas, propane and coal gas. The company says its products generate electricity at twice the efficiency of conventional fossil-fuel plants but with almost no air pollution.
FuelCell completed its first commercial installation in 2003. It now has 50 installations around the globe producing 1.5 billion kilowatts of electricity—enough to power 135,000 average-sized U.S. homes for a year.
During the installation process, the company prepares the client's site for the generators, including installing the pad on which they will sit. The company also executes the process of connecting the power systems to the client's power grid.
With a significant level of exposure to catastrophic loss during all of its installations, the risks are high, requiring "a real safety mindset in the company," says W. Bruce Murray, Jr., a Hartford, Conn.-based senior vice president at People's United Insurance Agency, which places FuelCell's coverage.
Those risks are magnified when FuelCell performs an installation abroad, where safety considerations can often be quite different from those in the U.S. In those cases, "There's a very different understanding of safety" that often does not rise to the level it is viewed domestically, says Murray.
The standards for what constitutes a clean work area in South Korea (where FuelCell recently installed a plant), for example, do not measure up to U.S. standards, he says. The same, he adds, is often true regarding equipment and power-lockdown controls in other countries.
Those factors pose particularly serious risks working with high-voltage equipment.
To address these risks, FuelCell imbues all of its worksites with its own engrained safety culture, says Murray. Even when local electricians have to be retained, their certifications are scrutinized to ensure they are capable of safely providing the services for which they've been contracted.
And while ensuring the operational safety of FuelCell's 540 employees and contracted workers is critical, the company must look beyond the risk of worksite accidents while working abroad, says Jim Charron, Boston-based practice leader of technology at Zurich North America, which underwrites the majority of FuelCell's risks, including Workers' Comp.
Employee safety, he explains, could be imperiled during a political disruption or a natural catastrophe. In those situations, says Charron, the preferred strategy for protecting employees is extraction.
For security reasons, Charron and Murray could not discuss specifics of the protocols FuelCell has in place for those life-threatening incidents. Charron, however, characterized it as "a pretty robust solution."
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