O’Donnell said the discovery often came during routine or proactive inspections.
“Sometimes routine insights because there’s been an incident or it’s just a proactive visit, and we discover there’s a cabinet open, and we think, oh, someone’s working here today, and no, someone’s broken in and they’ve stolen copper,” he said.
He added that physical security risks extended beyond battery storage assets themselves to the high-voltage substations and installations that accompany them, including historical fatalities involving children entering substations on utility networks.
“I guess when you have hundreds of discrete [assets] around the country, that state of knowledge might not be there,” he said, noting that cameras provided at least an early warning of unauthorised activity near a site.
Peter Hulkenberg, director and principal consultant at Pelagion, said copper theft was not a new phenomenon, but one the industry could learn from managing in other contexts.
