The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) reportedly plans to make it mandatory for mobile companies to utilise renewable energy sources to power their towers.
Under the new rules, at least 50 per cent of all towers and 20 per cent of the urban towers are to be powered by hybrid energy sources by 2015.
This will have to be scaled up to 75 per cent of rural towers and 33 per cent of towers in urban areas by 2020.
This is aimed at reducing the carbon emissions due to increased dependence on diesel. 70 per cent of India?s telecom towers are in rural areas. At present, 40 per cent of the towers? power requirements are met by grid electricity and 60 per cent by diesel generators.
According to data released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the diesel generators are of 10-15 KVA capacity and consume about 2 litres of diesel an hour and produce 2.63 kg of CO2 a litre. The total consumption is 2 billion litres of diesel and 5.3 million litres of CO2 is produced. For every KWH of grid electricity consumed, 0.84 kg of CO2 is emitted. The total CO2 emission is around 5 million tonnes of CO2 due to diesel consumption and around 8 million tonnes due to power grid per annum.
To provide incentive to the tower companies, it is believed that support will be extended by the Universal Services Obligation (USO) Fund to meet the initial cost.
