Martin Taylor, Mechanical Engineer, Killingholme Power Station
Hello I'm Martin Taylor and welcome to Killingholme Power Station, which you can see in the background. I'm a mechanical engineer here. Over the years I've been working on gas turbines, boilers, steam turbines. I'm looking at what we're going to be doing for the future of the station, including what equipment will be required to re-furbish, overhaul and also planning for our major outages over the next few years.
As well as the power stations, there's various aspects of E.ON. There's E.ON Engineering, who provide a lot of the high spec technical services to us. There's Central Networks, there's the trading side, there's the retail side. There's many aspects of it, not just power stations. We're not just about producing electric, we go all the way down the chain.
There's no really typical day for me. Over a month I could be having contractors meetings, writing technical specs- some of them only for a few thousand pounds a year, some of them are for hundreds of thousand pounds a year.
Joining E.ON, one of the first things I had to learn about, even though I'd done some of it as I say, with the armed forces in facilities management was contracts management. E.ON put me on a course; put me on their own in house course on how they do contract management. Over the past few years I've been to gas turbine conferences in Poland, Dubai, Berlin.
What's it like working for E.ON? It's good, it's varied. It's challenging as the business is continually changing. It's a private company; we've got to make money so we have to keep changing as the market dictates.
No job's perfect. Some of it is, it's not what I would say down sides, it's more frustrations. As I say, the company's continually changing, evolving so I may be working on something, I may have done all the background work to a specification, however because the business is changing we aren't gonna go down that route. We have to look at another route and I have to start again. So, there's frustrations as with any job.
Health and Safety is the top priority within E.ON. And, that's not just within E.ON UK, that's E.ON worldwide. We have a mantra here called Rule One 'We will not hurt people who work on our sites; we need your help to achieve it'. That is because we don't want to hurt anybody. The nature of the business is high risk, therefore we have to have all the measures in place to protect ourselves, protect our operations staff, protect our contractors. People come first before plant.
Well I think that's enough from me now. I've got a contract specification to complete. So, if you're thinking about joining E.ON, looking further, it's a good company to work for. Good bye.
