A solar farm is a wireless problem the size of a town. Thousands of inverters and trackers spread over square kilometres, no trenched fibre to most of it, and public coverage that is thin and not yours. A private 5G network covers the whole site — telemetry, security and inspection — on one network you own.
The solar farm — thousands of inverters, string boxes and trackers spread over square kilometres of open ground — had no trenched fibre to most of it and only thin, borrowed public coverage. Telemetry crawled, security was patchy, and inspection meant walking the rows.
A private 5G network covers the whole site as one network: high-power radios for wide-area outdoor coverage, an on-premises core so SCADA and data stay on-site, and managed devices on inverters, cameras and inspection drones.
The programme is a coverage-and-integration problem — survey a site measured in kilometres, place radios for wide-area outdoor coverage, stand up the core, and tie into SCADA and the security and inspection systems — not a product install.
Stated before any of them had an answer.
Trenching fibre to thousands of distributed assets is uneconomic; coverage had to be engineered wirelessly across square kilometres of open ground.
The public network is weak at a rural site and would not keep SCADA and generation data on-site or guarantee it.
CCTV across a remote perimeter and drone or robot inspection of the rows both need real bandwidth the site did not have.
Residency and continuity required an on-premises core so monitoring and control keep running when the single backhaul link fails.
The coverage and the on-premises core are marked because they are why a site runs its own 5G at all: coverage it engineers, and control and data it keeps.
The scope of the work, rather than a capability list.
Rarely the subsystem that sounds difficult.
Covering an open field is not covering a campus; high-power radios and link budgets have to carry the distances a solar farm spans.
Every inverter, string box and tracker is a device to cover and onboard, at a density and spread that favours cellular over anything else.
CCTV across the perimeter and drone inspection of the rows both push bandwidth upstream, which the old links could not carry.
An on-premises core keeps SCADA and security up when the single rural backhaul link fails, and adds operational surface the site has to run.
Wireless across square kilometres of panels, engineered to the site rather than borrowed from a weak public cell.
Real-time inverter, string and tracker telemetry across the site, on one network.
CCTV across the perimeter and drone or robot inspection of the rows, carried on the private network.
An on-premises core and local breakout, so SCADA and security keep running when the backhaul link fails.
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Trenching fibre to thousands of distributed assets over square kilometres is uneconomic, and rural public coverage is thin and not yours to guarantee or keep private. Private 5G covers the whole site wirelessly, keeps SCADA and data on-site, and carries security and inspection video.
Yes, with an on-premises core and local breakout. SCADA, telemetry and generation data stay on the farm, which matters for latency, for continuity when the backhaul fails, and for keeping operational data private.
Yes — with capacity planned for it on a slice. Perimeter CCTV and drone or robot inspection of the rows are two of the reasons a solar farm runs its own wide-area 5G.
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