December 3, 2021: South African battery and engineering firm Aztec, has announced that its latest battery anti-theft system has completed 24 months of field testing.

The inventor of the system, Dean Marcus, who is general manager and an engineer at Aztec, said the firm had recently completed the installation of more than 300 high-security battery cabinets for a local customer.

Marcus said: “Most telecoms battery anti-theft solutions suffer from the same problems: they don’t work nearly as well as advertised; they take far too long to install; they don’t protect against vandalism; and they make battery replacements almost impossible.”

The problem of battery theft from unmanned locations such as telecoms towers has been a long-standing headache for the industry. The situation is exacerbated in some of the poorer areas of the world, where the value of the battery is disproportionately larger than in richer countries.

The batteries typically in these locations are lithium and lead-acid ones, frequently with a cycle life of between 10 to 15 years. These are expensive in themselves with a value in the low thousands of dollars but are also valuable for their components and materials — most particularly lead.

The remoteness of the location typically means that regular defences against theft such as barbed wire, electric fencing and rooms surrounded by concrete and the like can be easily overcome.

“The problem with this approach is that their security is only as strong as their access points,” says Marcus. “Once you crack these open, then it’s relatively easy to get at the batteries.

“Some operators are using epoxy solutions where the batteries are encased in epoxy but these solutions are only mildly successful and pose a number of problems since failed batteries cannot be replaced and batteries that cannot be stolen are often simply vandalised. There is also the possibility of thermal events due to a lack of airflow.”

One alternative approach, he says, has been to individually lock the batteries into a high-security enclosure. Marcus’s solutions, which have been patented, are less concerned with the materials used because simply throwing epoxy, concrete and thicker steel at the problem does not solve it.

Typically each back-up power installation contains either eight to 16 lead-acid batteries or four to six lithium batteries. A complete solution including batteries could weigh in excess of 1,500kg making theft of the solution as a whole very difficult, time consuming and risky.