India’s telecom sector is making efficiency a core operating metric in 2025 as policy and market signals push networks to cut energy use, decarbonise power sourcing and design for circularity. The draft National Telecom Policy (NTP), 2025 puts numbers to this direction: reduce the sector’s carbon emissions by 30 per cent and power 30 per cent of towers with renewables by 2030.
Why now? Energy is one of the biggest controllable costs in mobile networks: 15-40 per cent of network operational expense is energy. Radio access network (RAN), which includes radios and site power, represents the bulk of this consumption. At the same time, 5G densification raises the electricity bill. Multiple studies suggest a typical 5G site can draw around three times the power of a 4G site before optimisation, largely due to massive multiple-input multiple-output radios and denser layers. This is why the focus has shifted from “more sites” to “smarter sites”.
With RAN optimised, the main driver of emissions becomes the energy that powers the sites. Once software and tuning squeeze out avoidable watts, what matters next is the source of the remaining load, hence the shift to green open access (OA) renewables and reduced diesel runtime.
Indian operators still run diesel generators (DGs) as backup at some sites. Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel note that DGs remain necessary where grid supply is unreliable, so power is not 100 per cent green yet. Against this backdrop, telcos are cutting site-level emissions by sourcing renewable electricity for towers through OA power purchase agreements (PPAs). OA power procurement is widening because the arithmetic is often favourable. Industrial OA landed tariffs for solar are typically around Rs 3.50 per unit (base) with additional state charges, which are still lower than high-tension grid tariffs in many states. Diesel generation used as backup (or in long-outage pockets) typically costs Rs 21 per kWh, which explains why swapping diesel hours with clean OA power plus storage is economical as well as green. OA volumes are scaling – India’s OA renewables surged to the tens of gigawatts mark in FY 2025, expanding the bankable PPA pool operators can tap.
On-the-ground moves from operators show this is not just theoretical. Vodafone Idea (Vi) reports a broad push on site-level efficiency and renewables – over 11,700 diesel elimination sites, more than 75 per cent outdoor base transceiver stations (a design that can cut site power nearly 20 per cent), 100 per cent low-power hardware for new sites, and more than 400 co-owned tower sites already running solar generation. Further, the Digital Infrastructure Providers Association and Vi announced a collaboration in June 2025 to accelerate sustainable telecom infrastructure and promote green energy open access (GEOA), which is useful because infrastructure providers can standardise templates and scale PPAs faster than single special purpose vehicle experiments. Airtel is also embracing this shift through onsite solar, GEOA pilots, hybrid batteries and 65 per cent “green sites”. Meanwhile, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited issued GEOA tenders to source renewable electricity for exchanges and offices.
Narrowband internet of things (NB-IoT) smart metering is gaining traction across utility and campus estates. Studies by Indian operators highlight NB-IoT as the preferred connectivity for large meter fleets because it combines deep coverage with low power draw. For operators, the relevance is simple: better metering means fewer losses, cleaner settlement under OA and credible baselines for service level agreements and environmental, social and governance reporting.
None of this negates the fact that traffic growth and 5G densification raise absolute kWh unless networks are actively optimised. Artificial intelligence (AI)-driven automation is useful, but credible reports also caution that AI workloads themselves add to electricity demand, so governance around when and where to run models really makes a difference.
A practical caveat is the risk of intermittency and curtailment in some states. OA users have learned to hedge against this with hybrid PPAs or on-site rooftop to ride through monsoon weeks, while the parallel build-out of grid-scale batteries will improve firmness over time.
As the sector moves from pilots to scale, the near-term playbook is already written in industry frameworks: extend traffic-aware energy features across the RAN as 5G-Advanced (Release 18) rolls in, and use Open RAN energy-saving functions to deepen sleep and runtime tuning without hurting experience. On the power side, securing multiyear green open access PPAs with capped escalators and shifting from single-resource projects to hybrid solar-wind with storage can help keep delivered costs predictable, even through curtailment and monsoon weeks. These steps align with India’s Bharat 6G guidance, which frames energy efficiency and circular practices as primary goals in network design.
Bottom line
Going forward, greener networks are expected to become operating norms, driven by policies like the NTP, sector alliances that standardise clean power for towers, and tenders that push OA renewables into everyday site operations. What matters next is achieving scale.
