Solarization of Towers

As per a survey by VOICE&DATA, India has approximately 353,813 telecom towers growing at 19 percent per annum. According to media reports, telecom tower industry is the second largest consumer of diesel with a consumption of 2 bn liters of diesel in 2010, first being the Indian railways. It's a toss on environment and tower companies, as they need to shell out huge money on energy.

As known, towers are indispensable to the development of telecommunications and it also fuels the growth of other industries.

Dilemmas

There is an urge and growing demand to embrace green telecom, particularly with respect to towers, but the tower segment is in a complete dilemma when it comes to deploying renewable energy. They neither want to break the stick nor would like to kill the snake, when it comes to deploying renewable sources at the base transceiver sites (BTS) due to the high upfront investment and long payback period. The alternative sources of energy becomes viable only if it is economically feasible and simultaneously resolves environmental concerns.

Apparently, we could list at least 6-8 different alternative sources of energy-solar, wind, biomass, geothermal, biofuel and ethanol, and hydrogen. However of all these we can bank only on solar as the most feasible renewable sources for towers followed by wind. Wind energy could be deployed only in places where the speed of the wind is more, preferably the wind speed should be 12 m/sec. The only feasible option is switching over to solar power systems. "Out of the 353,813 towers, there are just 15,000 towers running on solar energy across the country," says Pratik Chube, country general manager, product management & marketing,
Emerson Network Power India.

Challenges Plaguing Adoption

Tower companies are shying away from solar deployment. As per the industry, space constraints, operational challenges, maintenance, uptime, and capex are limiting the adoption of solar energy. First and foremost, the return on investment is a long pay back period, which varies from 3 years to 4 years at least and sometimes it could be even 7-10 years. Like any business entity, operators or infrastructure providers look forward for a pay back period of 2 years or less than that. "Although opex is phenomenally lower as compared to a DG operation, initial investment does actually justify until RoI is less than 2 years. The approximate capex cost for deploying solar energy is '7 lakh excluding BTS and DG," states Chube.

Secondly, setting up a solar energy infrastructure requires space. For a PV size of 2 kW, the PV panels consume a footprint of about 6X2 m, which might not be always available at a site. Simultaneously, roof tops have been eliminated from the list because panels and stands need a load bearing, which cannot be installed on roof tops.

As per Chube, considering the evolution of technology, conversion of solar light into electricity has not been impressive-the ratio is nearly 12 percent and efficiency of the conversion is about 40 percent. Therefore this is another aspect which is impacting the rapid deployment of solar energy into the BTS space.

Similarly, options available for keeping batteries cool on a stand-alone basis is crucial. While harnessing the power of sun if there is a temperature above 25°C, the life of the batteries will deteriorate. Cooling batteries is required; RF equipments can withstand up to 55°C.

A Remarkable Feat

Bharti Infratel has deployed solar hybrid solution in its network, in areas where there is poor grid or non-grid telecom sites in order to reduce diesel consumption and carbon emission. The company has used 3 kW-7 kW capacity solar panel and 600 Ah-1200 Ah battery banks. And, balance period is powered by solar energy and battery.

This solar hybrid solution has enabled the company to reduce nearly 19 MT of carbon dioxide each year per site. Besides, it has reduced the DG run hours from 20 hrs to 6 hrs a day. The architecture has 4 different layers: Solar panels, VRLA batteries (600 Ah-1200 Ah), hybrid solar controller (HSC), and a data management center (DMC).

However the solution wasn't without issues, some sites faced a challenge of availability of space; each kilowatt of solar energy required 7 square meters of a shadow-free and south-facing space. The other problem was the availability of a proven Renewable Energy Service Company (RESCO) vendor ecosystem to develop them to have expertise and a workable business model to serve the distributed remote rural sites at a reasonable cost. A stand-alone solar system involves a very high capex and also has limitations on cloudy and non-sunny days. Hence a hybrid system is designed to overcome the above 2 challenges.

Bharti Infratel has installed a solar hybrid solution in nearly 1,100 sites in Bihar circle with a cumulative capacity of more than 5 MW. In these sites, the company is generating around 8 mn units of electricity every year using renewable energy. For the 1,100 sites installed, annual carbon reduction is estimated to be 22,000 MT. It's planning to increase this solution to 2,000 sites.

Enhancing Government Aids

No problem is without a solution; the only thing that matters is the willingness to resolve and commitment to deploy it, come what may! Unless a solution is not implemented, its availability is of no use. And, many a times quality is directly proportional to the cost.

Hence government should come to the rescue of these tower companies for the betterment of both tower companies and environment. Government does provide subsidy, it provides 30 percent subsidy on the total cost of setting up eco-friendly towers in certain areas and supports its rollout in rural areas. Government should provide more subsidy on solar panels, rather than subsidizing diesel, which is also a burden and loss to the exchequer. "Government should support at the initial phase of deployment. Solar panels were initially subsidized but government withdrew this subsidy and limited it to the 100 towers only. And these 100 towers are insignificant," laments Manoj Kumar Singh, VP, energy management and technology, Indus Towers. "If not for all the towers, government should extend subsidies to atleast 70,000-80,000 towers," adds Singh.

A spokesperson of Bharti Infratel states, "Telecom being an industry focused on developing and maintaining communications networks, needs due support from the government and the power sector to fulfill its need of electricity supply."

Also, telcos should reconsider going eco-friendly, not only as part of their CSR activity but also for its own betterment. Since energy is one of the top 3 biggest and largest components of mobile operators leaving a heavy carbon footprint, hence nearly 50% of the tower cost is consumed by energy cost itself and one-third of the revenue goes to DG operations alone. Hence they should consider a capex model that is viable in the long run. "Opex would be reduced by almost 70 percent, reduction on DG sets is the actual cost savings. There will be a substantial savings if the dependency on DG is reduced by another 50 percent. Operators, infrastructure providers, and government should work in tandem," points out Singh.

Following China

Why shouldn't India ape China? China is a pioneer in high-end and fully-integrated autonomous solar power systems for the telecom towers. China has installed more than 40,000 autonomous solar-powered telecom sites even in remote regions under extreme climatic conditions such as -60°C to +50°C.