Inadequate Security
The design and planning concepts for each project varies, depending on country and budget. “The size of the farm also greatly affects the type of security required,” said Hagai Katz, Senior VP of Marketing and Business Development, Magal Security Systems. “This is still a budding market, so it is difficult to grasp a clear concept of what is required in terms of security for every situation.”
Due to the isolated nature of renewable energy sites, some places are equipped with minimal security. “At a wind farm, there is little that needs to be done in terms of security,” Scifers said. “Someone may drive to the site once a day but generally, no one is present at the site. This is often also true for many smaller solar farms. For some sites, a maintenance worker will simply go there once a week to log his visits into the system by swiping his RFID card, or by accessing the numeric key lock. It is not the type of facility where there are 200 people providing maintenance on a daily basis. Some solar farms may have secure structures to house the ancillary equipment.”
As previously mentioned, the size of the farm affects the level of maintenance and security required. “It is common to see someone on-site if it is a very big farm, although they are not there for security purposes but primarily for performance purposes — to monitor the equipment and make sure disturbances can be fixed in a timely manner,” Campbell said. “However having said that, there are still farms where there is no one on-site. This is because if, for example, a 500-kilowatt inverter goes down, the farm is only losing a tiny fraction of their generating power — it is not a catastrophe, compared to an oil rig or a nuclear power plant.”
The lack of dangerous substances on-site minimizes the amount of security and surveillance deemed necessary on-site for both maintenance and security purposes, said Gaetano Capula, Director of Marketing, GPS Standard.
The requested access control is often basic. “One can think of it like any other factory, where only basic access control is required,” Katz said. “This is because from a terror point of view, small solar and wind farms are not very high-profile.”
Perimeter security could be comprised of a standard fence. “However, farms should know that fences can be easily cut and bypassed,” Capula said. “Microphone cable or fiber optical systems may be in place to sound an alarm if a fence is being tampered with, but if the perpetrator refrains from touching the fence, such as by using a ladder, no alarm is generated.”
Many wind farms do not have fences because they are in remote locations and not many people access these areas,said Robert Putnam, Head of Media Relations, LRAD Corporation.
Much of the security equipment in place is installed as a safety precaution. “Energy collected at a farm is converted and housed in structures similar to freight containers,” Campbell said. “A 50 MW farm would have roughly 50 of these structures. Access control is simple at best and there may or may not be a security camera present. However, perimeter security is used to secure a group of houses within a grid-type substation to prevent unauthorized people from entering and accidentally electrocuting themselves.”
Still, not all farms have these structures. “There are farms where the inverter and other equipment are sitting out in the weather,” Scifers said.
More people are using video surveillance and recording, but it is not as prevalent as one may expect, Campbell said. “Large-scale security is not an area that is very developed at this point in time.”