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Automated thermal monitoring brings early fire detection and continuous condition monitoring insights to major Irish power plants.
The need for early fire detection is not an issue of efficiency at power plants where fires can cause grid shutdowns that affect up to 25% of Ireland’s power supply. It is an important part of national stability.
This reality became visible during the April 2025 blackouts in Spain and Portugal. This left millions of people in power, disrupting hospitals and rail systems, and sending shockwaves through the European energy sector.
The underlying causes remain under investigation, but the cascade effect of single grid failures rekindled urgent questions about energy infrastructure resilience, highlighting the dangers of inadequate detection systems.
Overcoming problematic failure points
To address that challenge, ESB Energy, along with Butler Technologies, deployed cutting-edge end-to-end thermal monitoring systems using FLIR technology.
Provides real-time alerts to increase engineer responsiveness and assist future energy infrastructure as they move to green power.
On Ireland’s robust west coast, Money Point Power Station, a legacy site that remodels its operations as an oil-fired plant, is setting new benchmarks for safety and resilience. With a fully integrated thermal monitoring system in place, the site is changing the way it manages its critical assets. It offers insights into 24-hour visibility, accurate early fire detection, and practical condition monitoring.
In an energy landscape where experts warn that grid vulnerabilities can lead to repeated scenarios of international disruption, the Irish installation offers a timely case study on how intelligent surveillance can stop local issues from becoming continental catastrophe.
This installation, using Flir Thermography, led by ESB and Butler, is the first in Ireland’s national grid. The impact is already clear. It reduces risk, protects uptime and lays the foundation for a more stable transition to renewables. Provides a working model for next-generation energy infrastructure.
From delayed responses to immediate alerts
Before automation, the thermal testing on the site was completely manual. Engineers used handheld cameras to walk down each week, often capturing images and editing reports after anomalies occurred. This meant that the critical alerts were delayed and fire risks would not be detected for several days.
That has now changed dramatically. With a fixed thermal camera continuously monitoring high-risk areas, the system provides sub-second response times and provides automatic alerts when an abnormal temperature appears. In safe environments such as turbine holes and substations, this rapidity can be the difference between regular corrections and events that threaten the grid.
In light of the outages of the Iberian Peninsula, where a single transmission failure reportedly caused widespread damage, this type of aggressive defense is not cautious and essential.
In fact, this solution has already demonstrated its ability to begin plant closure within 15 seconds of fire detection. This is an important requirement to prevent cascade failures that can disrupt almost half of the Irish grid, providing important redundancy to enhance the capacity of the system when overworked, overloaded, or simply performing necessary maintenance.
Granular data and definitive delta: inappropriate condition monitoring
Beyond fire detection, this system always provides insight into the health of assets. The camera monitors components such as transformers, cables, and valve actuators to detect changes in thermal signatures that can signal wear, stress, or risk of failure. With over 16,000 reference points per image, these heat supplies provide much more granular data than traditional sensors and manual inspections.
On-site engineers no longer need to rely on scheduled walkarounds or visual estimates. Instead, you will receive real-time alerts, thermal images, and accurate location data. It allows for fast, informed decisions without the need to interpret temperature deltas with your eyes. In fact, the site now orders more cameras based on the success of this new system, and learning born from the project has led to Butler Technologies to develop new applications for ESB Energy Shift Manager to receive push notifications via SMS, email and apps.
As John Free, Senior Account Manager at Butler Technologies, shifts focus on strengthening it, not on stealing skilled workers. “This is not about replacing engineers, it is about empowering them.
The first of an integrated, intuitive industry
One of the most powerful advantages of the system is its end-to-end design. Thermal imaging, backend software, and user interface have all been deployed as integrated solutions, allowing for seamless integration into the site’s existing video management system.
The alarms are displayed instantly from the centralized platform. If triggered, the thermal zone automatically expands the onscreen and tells the operator exactly where to look and act. Critical, thanks to a completely native architecture, there is no third-party hardware to maintain or troubleshoot.
The system features FLIR A500F and A70 thermal imaging cameras, and plans to scale to new devices such as the FLIR A700F and FLIR A700F PT to prepare stations to carry next-generation infrastructure, including cloud-based surveillance and AI-powered anomaly detection.
Built for today, prepared for tomorrow’s always ambitious applications
The station continues to operate as an oil shooting facility for now, but also serves as a national testing site for upcoming renewable energy initiatives, including offshore winds. That future improvement mission required surveillance solutions that evolved along it and could fit most of Ireland into green energy grids.
The system already supports exploratory work in advanced AI applications. This involves using visual surveillance to determine valve location or tracking operational trends across thermal patterns. These insights help pave the way for predictive maintenance, remote inspections, and safe operations of scale.
The ESB Project Engineer said, “We chose FLIR technology to provide the real-time accuracy and scalability needed to protect critical infrastructure. In an industry where uptime is all, FLIR thermal imaging provides the level of early detection and monitoring needed to protect both assets and national grids.”
Immediate benefits of Irish grids
As National Grids increase pressure on modernization, projects like this show how thermal automation can bring immediate benefits of safety and reliability, while laying the foundation for smarter, greener energy systems.
The station was the first in Ireland to implement such a comprehensive surveillance solution, and one of the first in Europe, directly linked to future renewable businesses. It is a powerful showcase of ways to far exceed temperatures if thermal vision is done correctly. It helps protect your assets, accelerate response times and maintain light for everyone.
ESB Energy has plans to further hone the use of its early fire detection system, similar to what FLIR specialises in creating. The systems at the MoneyPoint power plant have become a big topic within the organization, with Butler Technology leading to new lead monitoring substations with similar builds. This application is to monitor substation connection points and identify faults. A critical test for the ESB to identify system use cases within substations and, if successful, could be deployed to more than 500 substations in Ireland.
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