Abstract
Reliable electrical power systems are crucial to modern industries and our everyday lives as they enable the continuous generation, transmission and distribution of electrical energy. In order to ensure electrical energy security and economic growth, it is essential to have stable and reliable electrical equipment. South African electricity grid has become unreliable in recent years due to frequent power cuts caused by power stations breakdowns. These breakdowns are due to inadequate maintenance on power stations equipment. In order to increase the reliability of power stations, it is crucial that their equipment are properly maintained. Different maintenance strategies can be implemented to ensure equipment reliability, safe operations and reduce risks of failure. However, the quality, efficiency and effectiveness of maintenance depends on the personnel executing the work. This indicates that humans play a crucial role in ensuring adequate electrical equipment maintenance and thus the performance of the equipment and safe operations. This study investigates the impact of human factors on electrical equipment maintenance, performance and safety within a major electricity distribution company. The human factors that are investigated are training, human errors, organizational culture and ergonomics. A quantitative exploratory design was adopted using a structured survey and historical equipment failure and operating error reports from a major electricity distribution company. Maintenance personnel with relevant experience were selected through purposive sampling to participate in a survey and 60 historical equipment failure and operating reports from the major electricity distribution company were used for data analysis. Both descriptive and inferential techniques were used to analyse the collected data from the survey and historical reports. Descriptive analysis was used to summarise, organize and describe the main features of the data set by arranging the data into means, variances, standard deviation, percentages and graphs. Inferential analysis was used to test relationships, differences and associates between human factors and maintenance, performance and safety outcomes. This was done by performing reliability tests, factor analysis, correlation and regression, Chi- square tests, T- tests and ANOVA using IBM SPSS.
The survey results revealed that human factors explain nearly 50% of the variance in maintenance performance (R2 = 0.495). Organizational culture was found to be the most influential predictor of maintenance performance while training and ergonomics were found to not to be statistically significant. Historical records revealed that 67% of equipment failures and safety incidents were due to human factors and this validated the survey findings. This indicates that human factors have an impact on electrical equipment maintenance, performance and safety. The study further reveals in order to reduce the impact of these human factors; management strategies can be implemented...