Las Vegas NV Critical Infrastructure Protection

Las Vegas uses A LOT of electricity.  To power all of the casinos, light displays, and every other attraction in the city, Las Vegas uses around 8000 Megawats of electricity on an average day.  To accomplish this Las Vegas draws power from numerous sources.

The first source of power that Las Vegas uses comes from around 70% natural gas.  The rest is all from renewables.  Several of which consist of solar power plants.  In 2007, Nevada Solar One came into operation and produces around 134 GWh of electricity per year.  The other, the  Ivanpah Solar Power Facility came into operation in 2014 and has a gross capacity of 392 megawatts.  In addition to solar, the Hoover dam hydro power plant generates around 4 billion Killowat hours of electricity per year and also powers Las Vegas.  15% of the Hoover Dam’s power goes straight to Las Vegas.

With all of this renewable energy, efficient and safe energy storage is important.  Large battery arrays store the energy generated from solar plants and hyrdo power.  If one of these batteries would happen to catch on fire, it’s very important that the fire does not spread and cause more fires.  Effective use of fire barriers is essential to prevent the spread of fire.  It is also essential in hydro electric plants, in the case of a battery fire, that harmful environmental chemicals are not used that could spill into waterways and cause pollution.  Battery fire barriers are even more essential in these situations to mitigate loss and protect infrastructure while also protecting the environment.

Las Vegas also uses some off grid power facilities to generate power specifically to Las Vegas.  Protecting transformers from overload and explosion from other transformers is essential and fire barriers are essential to keep this infrastructure running.