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National Grid Partners

The war in Ukraine has only increased Grain’s strategic importance. Not only does the terminal serve as an essential supplier of energy to the UK, but it’s also a key facility for storing and moving gas into Europe. Today, the terminal is handling a record number of vessels—30 percent more than its previous busiest year. 

Using AI to Optimize Critical National Infrastructure

Urbint’s mission is to build a world with zero safety incidents — protecting workers, communities, infrastructure assets, and the environment. Over the past decade, even though injury rates have declined across the industry, fatalities and serious injuries have not fallen meaningfully. With mounting challenges including extreme weather, aging infrastructure, a changing workforce, and increased construction activity, risk to front-line workers requires innovative solutions.

Urbint for Worker Safety leverages advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) and safety science to identify the highest-risk threats across job sites days in advance. Even the most experienced workers can’t identify all hazards on their own. Urbint’s worker safety solution analyzes data on worksites, schedules, historical incidents, and environmental conditions to deliver specific risk insights, empowering managers and workers to take preventive actions — whether that’s implementing a control, stopping work, or holding a targeted safety brief.

What They Do

When National Grid Partners initially invested in Urbint, the company was primarily focused on identifying third-party excavation threats to underground assets, particularly natural gas lines. National Grid successfully leveraged Urbint’s Damage Prevention solution to reduce asset damage across the northeast. The collaboration naturally grew to encompass Urbint for Worker Safety, which leverages AI technology to prevent serious injuries and fatalities to workers. National Grid, like all utilities these days, faces an increasing volume of work and new environmental risks. By working together, National Grid Partners and Urbint are able to stay ahead of these challenges and help keep workers safe.

Why National Grid Partners Invested

National Grid teamed with Urbint to deploy its worker safety solution on gas pipeline and LNG construction projects in the northeast U.S. service territory. The goal is to help supervisors identify safety hazards and implement controls consistently across contractors and to provide the safety assurance team with greater insight into daily work performed, so they can prioritize site visits to occur during high-risk tasks.

Urbint worked with many of National Grid’s more experienced supervisors to calibrate the startup’s risk engine and safety science, ensuring consistency across National Grid’s operational footprint and smooth incorporation into on-site workflows. That’s made it easier for supervisors in the field to identify hazards and decide where to focus their time, as well as to reduce time spent filling out inspection paperwork.

“By stepping up as an early adopter of this technology, National Grid is not only helping to protect workers but also serving as an industry pioneer. This is an important step toward standardizing and transforming safety across the entire industry, and National Grid is on the forefront of that,” says Corey Capasso, CEO and founder of Urbint.

Through this work, Urbint has identified 35% more hazards than inspectors and contractor crews could on their own. The collaboration also has proposed 44% more safety controls than field teams could develop on their own.

Worker Safety Use Case — Benefits to National Grid and the Communities We Serve

“By stepping up as an early adopter of this technology, National Grid is not only helping to protect workers but also serving as an industry pioneer. This is an important step toward standardizing and transforming safety across the entire industry, and National Grid is on the forefront of that.”

At National Grid, safety is our top priority. In the near future, our objective is to incorporate Urbint for Worker Safety across electric and gas distribution and transmission construction operations throughout the entire service territory.

And while safety is at the forefront of our partnership with Urbint, additional benefits have surfaced as well. “Everyone is really seeing the value around hazard identification. But we’ve also identified operational value around time savings, performance management, project and contract performance,” explains Clara Giustino, Vice President for New York Gas Complex Construction.

Together, National Grid and Urbint are helping decrease injuries and have a meaningful impact on workers’ lives.

Urbint Boosts Utility Worker Safety