Theft, vandalism and arson at energy sites

Counted from the live register.

Fires and faults are not the only way an energy site loses money. Cable is cut and taken, modules are stripped from mounting rails, substations are broken into, and sites are set alight. This page counts what the register holds on crime at energy assets, and is honest about what it does not hold.

Counting...

What kind of crime

By year

By technology, and where

Every entry

What this page cannot tell you yet

Three things, said plainly, because a security manager will work them out in a minute and it is better to say them first.

  1. The register under-counts crime. Entries are written from published reporting, and a fire gets reported where a cable theft usually does not. An operator often has no reason to tell anyone. So these figures are a floor, not a total.
  2. Losses are rarely stated. A report says cable was taken. It does not often say how much, what it cost to replace, or how long the site was down.
  3. What the site had in place is almost never reported. Whether there was a fence, a camera, a monitored alarm or nothing at all is the question every security assessment starts with, and public reporting answers it in a handful of cases.
  4. Some of these are suspicions, not findings. Where the reporting says suspected, alleged or under investigation, the entry says so and it is marked on the list below. The register does not decide a cause that no source has established, and entries whose sources rule the crime out are left off this page entirely.

Those gaps are the reason the confidential route exists. An operator or a security provider can send an incident through the site and it is anonymised absolutely: no site, no company, no product, no person, country and year only, in the public entry and in the paid record. That rule never bends, which is why people use it.

If you work in site security

Browse the whole register See the plans