Evaluation of aleatory risk and correlation between risk level and costs in Enel Distribuzione

The intense development of the electricity market deregulation in Europe has produced a new scenario with a multiplicity of operators involved in the electric system activities. In this context, the operation of the electric network and the property of the plants could be entrusted to different companies. For this reason an evolution of the concept of safety is necessary and the introduction of risk management methodologies in the safety field can be useful. Changing the approach to safety management is playing an important role for utilities so that, besides monitoring the injury phenomenon, they also have to consider, in safety field, efficiency and efficacy targets, as other business activities. Nowadays, risk management applied to safety field has to be considered as a profit centre and not just as a cost centre anymore. To this aim, for a company it is necessary to provide a safety management system that, not only analyzes and evaluates the risks and takes measures to prevent injuries, but also can individuate the best safety level at the lower total cost. Every company has to invest in prevention and protection and to try to reduce the number and the severity of the accidents to improve its social reputation. For this reason, in order to minimize the safety costs, it is necessary to create a model able to represent these costs, related to the risk level associated to working activities. In this context, the aim of the paper is to show how economic and quality benefits can be derived from a good application of safety aleatory risk management.