30 March 2022 - Aude Desbrieres
Featured in: Market Insights, Intrusion detection
Over the last decade, there has been a significant increase in the number of solar farms being built across Europe in the attempt to decrease the dependency on fossil fuel and create renewable energy sources. Government schemes have helped fund solar energy and thousands of large sites have been built in just a few years, with the most recent examples over 150 hectares wide.
Located in rural areas and unmanned, solar power plants include expensive equipment that could be targeted by criminals: ranging from the photovoltaic panels, to the inverters and transformers. Our OPTEX teams have been involved in hundreds of projects across the continent to help secure the sites against unauthorised access.
Fence protection
The majority of solar power plants that OPTEX is helping to protect are surrounded by a fence, which provides a great first layer of security. However, intruders could still damage the fence to access the site. Our fibre optic sensors have been deployed to detect any attempt to cut the fence, or climb over the fence.
OPTEX FiberSensys’ technology is perfectly adapted as it is resistant to lightning and RF interferences. It can be deployed in multiple zones so if there is an attempt to intrude different parts of the perimeter fence at the same time, the system will notice each zone of attack. The use of fibre optic sensor is also cost effective. As the size of solar farm sites is at least two hectares but usually larger than this, the perimeter fence will be at least 600m but most likely over 1km length.
Additionally, the Alarm Processor Unit used in our FD sensors series has a projected life of 20 years which gives a low cost of maintenance to solar power plants, which calculate their cost with the life span of solar panels averaging between 25 to 30 years.
To complement the fence protection, it is important to protect the access point to the site which is the gate. Here an additional, dual tech sensor or LiDAR sensor can be deployed to monitor individual and vehicles movements by the entrance gate.
Open sites
To minimise the visual impact of solar plants, some authorities will request the site owners to avoid using security fences, and instead use hedges or vegetation planting. Such open sites are more likely to have wildlife roaming around which makes their protection more challenging. In such cases, virtual perimeter detection can be deployed using LiDAR technology and the object size can be determined to ignore small to medium size wildlife. Our REDSCAN sensors have been deployed in many sites, creating virtual walls, and the range of the new REDSCAN Pro series covers 100m which provides great benefits for larger sites. The combination of sensing technology with video cameras will provide the best solution to blend within the environment while protecting valuable equipment.
If you would like more information on our fibre optic or LiDAR technologies, contact us.
