State Power Investment Inner Mongolia Company

Vanma Lock System Standardizes O&M Safety & Accountability For Solar PV Plant

State Power Investment Corporation Ningbo logo
China’s SPIC Inner Mongolia Stallion Solar PV Plant Lock Management

Industries

Power Generation

Scale

300 MW Desert Solar, 133-Day Record Build

Awards

2018 China Energy Innovation Prize, 2021 National Quality Project Award

Vision

World’s Largest Graphic-PV Station

Vanma passive lock

Vanma Lock for More Industries

Vanma Lock systems enhance security and streamline operations in the power industry and are also applicable across various sectors including telecommunications, power, banking, and logistics.

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Challenge

Stallion Solar covers 6,000 acres of desert with 196,000+ PV panels. Legacy padlocks required dozens of keys per shift, making key hand-over slow and error-prone. There was no reliable log to link a specific lock opening to the technician who performed maintenance or disconnection work.

Solution

SPIC deployed 428 Vanma WM-2000C-L35 passive electronic padlocks on inverters, control cabinets, ladders and gates, managed by 20 K01 programmable keys.

Outcome

The installation of Vanma’s passive electronic lock system at Stallion Solar has significantly strengthened site security and streamlined daily O&M. It delivers complete oversight of every lock event, reduces operational risk to near-zero, and creates an accountable, tamper-proof audit trail—allowing the plant to maintain record-breaking generation while meeting the strictest safety standards.

100%

40%

100%

elimination of lost-key incidents.

faster daily inspection rounds

Full traceability achieved

Details

Utility-scale solar plants must guarantee continuous generation. Unsecured cabinets expose high-voltage electronics to sabotage, theft or accidental re-energization. Traditional locks cannot scale across thousands of identical enclosures, while paper logs are untrustworthy. SPIC chose Vanma to digitize, centralize and simplify lock control across the entire Stallion site.

Key Overload & Mis-Matches

Problem

Before Vanma, every maintenance team carried a ring of 30+ mechanical keys. The physical weight was only half the issue: technicians spent an average of 7 minutes per stop trying keys in multiple padlocks, often forcing the wrong one and damaging the lock core. With 428 enclosures spread across 6,000 acres, a single daily inspection required 3 extra man-hours of fumbling—time that could have been spent on actual maintenance.

Vanma Solution

A single K01 electronic key is now pre-loaded via Bluetooth with an encrypted access list for all 428 WM-2000C-L35 padlocks.

  • Auto-expiry: Rights vanish the moment the shift ends—no forgotten or duplicated keys.
  • Visual confirmation: The key’s OLED screen displays the exact cabinet ID before unlocking, eliminating guesswork.
  • Result: Average per-cabinet access time drops to 20 seconds and zero lock cores have been damaged since go-live.

Offline Accountability Gap

Problem

The desert site sits in a 4G dead-zone; real-time cloud logging was impossible. Paper logbooks were smudged by sand, and 30 % of entries were illegible or missing, making incident investigations a guessing game.

Vanma Solution

A single K01 electronic key is now pre-loaded via Bluetooth with an encrypted access list for all 428 WM-2000C-L35 padlocks.

  • Tamper-proof: AES-256 encryption prevents post-edit manipulation.
  • Auto-sync: Docking the key in the depot uploads the entire records within 90 seconds.
  • Result: 100 % event capture rate achieved, and audit trails are now courtroom-grade evidence.

Safety During Disconnection

Problem

During lock-out/tag-out (LOTO), two incidents in 2022 saw cabinets mistakenly re-energized after technicians left site, risking arc-flash injuries and multi-million-yuan downtime.

Vanma Solution

Vanma keys are tied to the plant’s EMS (Energy Management System).
  • Dynamic disable: Once a cabinet is tagged out, the key refuses to unlock it until the digital work permit is electronically closed and signed off by both operator and supervisor.
  • Result: Zero unauthorized re-energizations since deployment and full compliance with GB/T 26860 electrical-safety standards.
“Vanma’s electronic locks allow our technicians to open any authorized panel with one key while giving us full traceability. The offline data buffer works perfectly in our desert environment, and their support team responds within hours.”
Wang Tao
O&M Manager, SPIC Inner Mongolia Stallion Solar Plant

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