PROTECTING THE COPPER CABLES OF THE PHOTOVOLTAIC PLANT
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Copper cables, the red gold! Within a photovoltaic plant you can find quintals of them and they are stolen like hot cakes! Protect them with a very simple “thief-proof” system |
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Even if the plant has already a protection against theft, like perimeter barriers or videosurveillance, professional thieves know how to “bypass” them in order to get into the ground during the night and steal all the power cables from the main underground pipes.
Traditional protections are not arranged to protect also the cables, but with the sensitive optical fiber chain of Luceat you will be able to alarm the wells and the all the contained cables. A brief example: let's consider a 990 kW ground-mounted park.
Usually in such a kind of plants, a 100 m central canal is present, that connects the inverter box with all the rows (usually 22 rows of 200 panels, with distance 7/8 meters).
A LiteWire antirodent armoured plastic optical fiber cable will be inserted inside the central canal.
The optical cable will create a sort of ring inside the underground pipe: one half of the optical cable will travel along with the power copper cables and will be fixed directly to them, simply using plastic straps; the returning other half will be fixed to the lids of the wells.
Both the ends of the antirodent optical cable will then be connected to the LiteSun device, safely located inside the inverter box. An already existing alarm unit and LiteSun will be connected by an NC contact.
The anti-theft effect is ensured: when the thief will raise the lid, LiteCopper, will detect the deflections of the optical cable fixed on the lid and trigger the alarm! In case the well is not opened and the thief, after digging a hole in the ground, is trying to directly pull the power cables out of the pipes, this action will move instead the optical cable fixed to the copper cables, trigging the alarm.
A “thief-proof” protection at a very low price (less then 2000€ list price for the 990kW example plant).