According to a report by Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune and Forschungszentrum Julich in Germany, the Indian telecom sector consumes up to 7.5 billion litres of diesel annually to run its mobile towers. Further, the total annual emissions from the sector are at about 27.9 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and 295 Gigagrams of nitrogen oxides.
According to the report, the mobile towers require continuous power supply and largely depend on diesel generator sets and electricity from the grid as power supply is not assured in either cities or rural areas.
In order to calculate the amount of diesel used and the corresponding pollution figures, the authors used the emission factor or the average emission rates from the diesel generator sets used for telecom towers as a measure.
The report further indicated that the telecom sector used energy measuring about 660,000 MWh in Delhi in 2011, thereby generating 382 tonnes of carbon dioxide and 2,123 tonnes of particulate matter.
