Blue Wire on France's largest solar farm
A security project on a very large site
SEO title: Solar farm: fibre optic network and perimeter protection — Blue Wire project report
Meta description: Blue Wire worked with the SPIE group on France's largest solar farm: fibre optic links between delivery points, CCTV and perimeter intrusion detection.
A former NATO air base converted into a photovoltaic generation site: this is the setting in which Blue Wire worked, alongside the SPIE group, to deploy a fibre network and a perimeter protection system. This kind of project illustrates very clearly what changes when an IT infrastructure leaves the building and spreads across several dozen hectares.
The context: a solar farm is not an office site
Blue Wire was approached by the SPIE group to support the deployment of a fibre network and the installation of a perimeter protection system on this solar farm. Our technology offering had already proved its worth on a site in northern France, and the exercise was repeated on this generation site, the largest in the country.
For a company director or an IT manager, the value of this project report does not lie in the size of the site. It lies in the nature of the constraints: equipment spread far apart, no permanent human presence, and production that has to be monitored continuously. Those three conditions are found in many far more modest industrial settings.
Distances that rule out the usual solutions
On a site of this size, conventional copper links cannot cover the distances involved, and the electrical interference associated with power generation makes matters more complicated still. Fibre optic cabling answers both problems: it covers long distances and is immune to electromagnetic interference. That is what makes it, here, a structural choice rather than a mere convenience.
An open site, rarely visited, and therefore exposed
A solar generation site contains valuable equipment, spread over a large area, with only occasional visits. The question is therefore not simply to establish after the event that an incident has occurred, but to know as early as possible that someone has crossed the boundary. That is the purpose of the perimeter protection system described below.
The four strands of our work
In practical terms, we worked on the following points:
Commissioning of the entire fibre optic network between each energy delivery point.
Deployment of a CCTV network with 14 dome cameras.
Installation of an Optex perimeter intrusion detection system on the boundary fence, based on a fibre optic motion detector.
Collection of the detector contacts via a network of controllers.
These four strands are not independent of one another: the fibre carries the video, the perimeter detection feeds the controllers, and the whole thing only makes sense if it reports back to a supervision point. It is this overall coherence that makes the difference between an installation that works on the day it is handed over and one that holds up over time.
