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  5. Meerkat™: Tech-enabled Physical Security

Substations are critical nodes in the power grid, routing electricity to homes, businesses, and essential infrastructure. Their uninterrupted operation — and ongoing protection — is vital for any reliable, resilient power system.  Strengthening substation security is a strategic imperative, and that's where Meerkat™ comes in.

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Step into the world of Meerkat™, where real-time, 3D-modeled assessments paired with line-of-sight technology are transforming the future of physical security.

For every project, our multidisciplinary engineering team dives deep to reimagine protection at substations and critical facilities. Using high-fidelity data to develop accurate 3D models of the facility and its surrounding terrain, we visualize potential gaps in security from every conceivable angle, uncovering opportunities traditional methods overlook.

We use dynamic modeling in place of conventional approaches. Then, our experts design precision-engineered solutions specifically for your site. Nothing is left to chance when it comes to safeguarding your critical assets. 

Our approach to smarter security

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Why did we develop Meerkat™?

When our substation clients faced increasingly complex physical security challenges, we were inspired to create a tech-driven solution to meet their evolving needs.

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Innovative security solutions

Our groundbreaking technology helps identify vulnerabilities before attacks happen, ensuring your critical assets stay secure.

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Objective security, modeled in 3D

As featured in North American Clean Energy, Meerkat™ uses interactive 3D models to visualize and test physical security strategies — like walls or vegetation — before implementation. This objective, data-driven approach helps utilities strengthen grid resilience and meet regulatory expectations with confidence.

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Our Meerkat™ solutions allow us to strengthen the physical security posture of our client's facilities, design the best cost solutions, and reduce the risk profile of a location before construction starts. This is done in real time using digital twin technology.

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Ready to elevate your physical substation security strategy?

Get in touch with our physical security specialists today!

Our Meerkat™ expert

prf-Chris Ott
Chris Ott
Principal Substation Project Engineer
United States
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Frequently Asked Questions

Meerkat™ is a data-driven, line-of-sight-based security analysis tool that can help substation owners and operators choose the most cost-effective and comprehensive solutions for their physical security system upgrade projects. It uses high-fidelity data of the facility and surrounding terrain to produce a realistic 3D model that can be manipulated in real time to test assumptions about how effectively certain mitigation tactics will protect critical assets from ballistic threats. Supported by a team of industry experts, this tool can help you feel confident in choosing the security upgrades that are the best for your budget.
It can do both! The NERC CIP-014 standard accepts many ways to conduct threat and vulnerability studies, and we kept them all in mind when designing Meerkat™. The collaborative nature of our tool allows a wide variety of inputs to weigh in throughout the lifecycle of the project, including those derived from other analysis methods. Meerkat™ can help you test solutions and explore alternatives.
Our patented* methodology uses high-quality, location-based data for every site. When publicly available data or pre-existing 3D models of the area are outdated or insufficient for our purposes, we collect our own high-fidelity data of the site. This ensures accurate analyses of your locations, even in scenarios where there have been significant changes to the area. Because of this, our site-specific data is often more accurate than the publicly available data used in other methods of security analysis. The fact-based and data-driven results provided by Meerkat™ allow us to remove subjective opinions from security analysis and provide you with confidence in your chosen security solutions.
Meerkat™ can benefit any substation site, no matter the shape, size or lifecycle stage. For planned and new locations, the proposed substation layout can be synthesized into the tool and mitigations can be tested before the site has been constructed. For existing locations, high-quality data is collected to map out an accurate 3D model of the existing infrastructure and mitigations. That accurate model can then be manipulated in real time to show you whether your existing solutions can be used in more effective ways and help you determine where additional mitigations are most needed.
While this feature is on our radar for the future development of this tool, for now our experts remain connected to the project throughout the duration of the surveying, testing and analysis phases. In the meantime, you will have direct access to our industry leading team of physical substation security experts, innovation leaders, visualization specialists and experienced engineers. They will be available to discuss operational concerns around mitigation designs before the final selections are chosen.
While the upfront investment of Meerkat™ is marginally higher than other traditional methods, our tool has the potential to provide significant cost savings in other parts of your project. When involved early in the design and engineering phases of your project, Meerkat™ can minimize construction costs while maximizing security benefits. In addition to that, Meerkat™ can be categorized as capital expenditure, opening your operations and maintenance budgets for other applications. Another benefit of Meerkat™ is the amount of time it saves, allowing your teams to make informed and tested decisions in a matter of weeks rather than months.

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