In 2010, Rio Grande Energia (RGE) decided a change was in order for its electricity stations. These stations, responsible for the electrical distribution throughout the north-northeast portion of Rio Grande do Sul, serve 262 municipalities - representing 51 percent of all counties in this Brazilian state.
Previously, security at all electricity substations was comprised of an intrusion and alarm...
In 2010, Rio Grande Energia (RGE) decided a change was in order for its electricity stations. These stations, responsible for the electrical distribution throughout the north-northeast portion of Rio Grande do Sul, serve 262 municipalities - representing 51 percent of all counties in this Brazilian state.
Previously, security at all electricity substations was comprised of an intrusion and alarm system. In turn, these alarm systems were tied into various support stations to alert technical workers of a possible situation.
Yet, while straightforward enough, these support stations are generally located a great distance from the outlying electricity substations. In essence, if an alarm were to go off, a maintenance worker would have to place their normal work duties on the backburner, and literally drive for hours to determine the nature of the incident – a waste of both time and company resources.
Additionally, while an alarm might actually relate to a legitimate security threat, it was far more often an everyday occurrence – such as grazing animals wandering too near the facility – that triggered the response. Unfortunately, due to the distance between substations and support points, and the fact that these are all located in a rural environment; no infrastructure was in place to support technology such as live Internet feed. As such, technical workers were forced to spend an increasingly large percentage of their workdays chasing nothing. Both RGE and their employees agreed something needed to be done.
This is the question RGE executives asked themselves. The cost of building the infrastructure necessary for Internet access, from the ground up, was cost prohibitive – to say the least. From a conventional security standpoint, the options of providing real-time video… the vital component in order to eliminate this growing time nuisance… were few and far between.
Enter Alvaro de Souza and VMI. After considerable time spent pondering possibilities, and ruling others out, Mr. Souza chose an inventive path. With the help of Hikvision security technology, it was indeed possible to supply these support stations with the necessary real-time video of each-and-every electricity substation. The trick was in the DVR, or more specifically, Hikvision's Mobile DVR with 3G module.