Energy-based safety glossary
The vocabulary of energy-based safety, each term defined plainly.
- Energy-Based Safety (EBS)
- A hazard recognition and control approach that starts from energy, not from rules.
- Energy Wheel
- The visual listing the ten sources of energy present in work.
- High-energy hazard
- A hazard whose energy, if released, is enough to kill or cause life-altering injury.
- High-energy threshold (1,500 joules)
- The research-based line above which a serious injury is the most likely outcome of contact.
- STKY (Stuff That Kills You)
- The plain-language name for the high-energy hazards on a job.
- Direct Control
- A control that stops a high-energy release even when a person makes a mistake.
- Alternative Control
- What is required where no Direct Control is feasible: layered error-reduction measures.
- The 3Ts (Timely, Tangible, Targeted)
- The entry test for whether a measure counts as a control at all.
- High-energy control assessment
- A field assessment of whether each high-energy hazard on a task has a Direct Control.
- Assessor calibration
- Getting assessors to score the same control the same way, so the number means something.
- SIF (serious injury or fatality)
- The outcomes energy-based safety exists to prevent.
- HOP (Human and Organisational Performance)
- A safety philosophy built on the idea that error is normal and systems should absorb it.
- Critical risk
- A risk that can kill or cause permanent harm; the risks a critical risk programme names and controls.