The security firm DeterTech held a three-day showcase last week; one day for each crime type: crime against retail, the construction sector, and renewable energy. We visited day three, for the latest about the threat against renewables – solar farms, and wind turbines.
Some of the threats against those three sectors overlap: a solar farm’s at its most vulnerable while it’s being built – attractive to thieves for the power tools and plant machinery around, before the site has a fixed perimeter; and the solar panels and cabling before it’s installed. We featured DeterTech’s previous such showcase, a single day, in the April 2023 edition of Professional Security Magazine. The stakes for commercial firms running and building solar and wind farms, and the nation in terms of its infrastructure as the UK relies ever more on renewables for its energy, are only increasing. So are the threats from (serious and organised) crime, given the attractively high price of metals, making theft of copper for its scrap value worthwhile to criminals.
The day spelt out the methods used by the thieves, and the premium on stock-taking of perimeter and other security measures. Thieves may knock out a surveillance camera by pushing it to face the ground, and make a gap in fencing to allow entry, and leave it, and wait: to see the police and hired security response (if any). If the security measures stay unrepaired, the thieves can proceed – perhaps several taking all night to load perhaps kilometres-long cable runs into a van, or burning the rubber off cable to get at the copper.
NICRP
Police speakers at the event made plain that they need to partner with others, not only if they are to collar such thieves, but to share intelligence through such public-private bodies as the National Infrastructure Crime Reduction Partnership (NICRP), and understand the criminals’ methods so as to inform the wider industry. The day heard a geopolitical point made at the session on crime against building sites run by the consultant Frank Cannon (who was among the attenders at DeterTech) at the London Build show in November, featured in the January edition of Professional Security: that Russia’s wealthy are getting around sanctions against themselves and their country due to Russia’s war in Ukraine – whether seeking tractors, or high-end cars, or parts for their cars – by buying stolen goods. That’s the demand side of the market; the supply is in those goods stolen from western Europe.
Partner
Against such threats, what can a solar or wind farm do – unstaffed, remote? Hence firms such as DeterTech, and the services they offer – beyond products, such as their PID 360 (on a tripod, a common sight on building sites and void property, generally, for passive intrusion detection; pictured, on display at the venue’s entrance) and forensic marking products (as applied to copper, or solar panels, that if stolen and recovered links the item to the crime scene scientifically), to their alarm receiving centre (ARC) that takes alarms from its PIDs. Long a feature of DeterTech services, going back to its earliest days under the Smartwater name before it was acquired by private equity, is the care taken (as with official messaging by the police and the UK official National Protective Security Authority) with, and the stress put upon display of, the signage to show that the company’s products are in use on a site. The aim; that thieves will simply see that, decide it’s best not to target that site, and look elsewhere. Also striking is the length of time that DeterTech like other private firms have had to take, to build up relations with the public sector. While both sides understand that the relationship has to have a commercial basis, for it to be lasting, and for police to have the trust in a business to make information-sharing agreements with it, as the police have with DeterTech, relations have to be more than merely transactional and fleeting.
Venue
As an aside, the venue was of interest to any commercial firm looking like DeterTech to put on a show. Your base may not have the room or be designed to cater (including food) for scores of visitors. Typically you may hire a hotel or conference centre; but, what hotel has a room with a high enough ceiling for a CCTV tower?! Yes, you can set up high or heavy kit in a car park, outside a venue; but what hotel has enough car parking space, and what of health and safety, and do you want to risk your audience getting rained on?! Hence the appeal of the Hartlebury site (once 25 MU, a wartime maintenance unit of the Royal Air Force) of the creative and events agency DPRG.
