Gardner Energy is an electric utility company that has served Gardner, Kan., a suburb of Kansas City, for more than 100 years.

Copper theft and crime continued to challenge their operation. After vandals entered a substation during a holiday weekend and damaged the control boxes, the utility board decided to consider options to upgrade security to protect against future threats. In 2008, thieves successfully stole tens of thousands of dollars worth of material from a storage yard. Two years later, vandals broke into a substation attempting to steal copper conductors from an operations area. They cut the lock off the control cabinet and tampered with the controls in order to de-energize the conductors that they were trying to steal. Doing so, they cut power to approximately a third of the town.