Diagram of battery-free busbar hot-spot monitoring inside a switchgear cabinet: SenseID temperature tags mounted on busbar joints detect a hot spot, are read by a UHF RFID reader, and feed per-joint temperature into asset management (CMMS/SCADA).

Battery-free temperature sensors detect busbar hot spots inside live switchgear — no wires, no batteries. How it works, which protocol to choose, and the business case.

Two-panel diagram showing HV asset constraints on the left (sealed, high voltage, long lifecycle, mission-critical, no cables, no batteries) and the seven cross-domain engineering challenges on the right (antenna, energy harvesting, power management, sensor, firmware, communication, software), with a section explaining why the system can't be split across specialists.

High-voltage switchgear, GIS and transformers are sealed, inaccessible, and mission-critical. Monitoring them requires battery-free sensing — and battery-free sensing requires a team that owns the entire HW/FW/SW/RF stack. Here’s why.