Optimising Energy Use: Tower companies take steps to reduce the industry’s carbon footprint

With the ever-increasing demand for telecom services, energy consumption for telecom network operations has also increased sign­i­ficantly. The need to reduce opex as well as the industry’s carbon footprint has led tower companies to experiment with alternative power sources. Telecom companies are now turning to renewable energy solutions to reduce emissions, energy costs and diesel logistics costs. At  the “Telecom Infrastructure in India” conference organised by tele.net, industry stakeholders discussed the key trends in the energy management space, the emerging technologies, and the issues and challenges faced. Excerpts…

Sharat Chandra

Besides inadequate availability of grid-connected power, issues relating to frequent disruptions, power unreliability and inf­e­rior power quality are equally important. In order to address these issues, we need to take a holistic view of energy management and not just look at power availability per se. Infrastructure providers should see that they have the right energy footprint in the first place.

To tackle energy management challenges, the industry has leveraged various products and solutions such as batteries, solar photovoltaic cells and fuel cells. We now need to move from products and solutions to an outcome-oriented model. To this end, we need companies that can promise a given uptime along with a reduction in opex. These companies will have to make use of technology for achieving the objectives.

Going forward, predictive analytics will be the key to a successful energy management strategy. Analytics tools should not only be used to analyse what happened in the past but also to predict what is going to happen in the future. Analytics should begin with site configuration itself.

We need to use energy storage effectively to solve the problem of grid power deficiency. Effective use involves a combination of lithium batteries and valve-regulated lead-acid batteries. Further, site configuration should be planned well in order to reduce opex on energy. Mean­while, if we are using renewable energy solutions with energy storage platforms, the former should be given the first right to deliver the load.

Companies that are financially healthy have been able to progress fairly well in terms of renewable energy deployments as compared to those that are financially challenged. Going forward, the industry as a whole needs to realise that energy is now a common binding factor across infrastructure providers and there is a need to adopt a business model for energy management that will transform capex into opex.

“We need to use energy storage effectively to solve the problem of grid power deficiency.” Sharat Chandra

Tushar Kapadia

The challenges faced by infrastructure providers have changed with the changing business scenario. Hence, there is a need to keep devising new solutions to address these newer challenges. One key challenge is the lack of 24×7 power in most areas of the country. About 50 per cent of the areas still have less than 12 hours of power availability. This increases the cost of maintaining network uptime. Infrastructure provi­ders want to bring in innovative solutions to cater to this problem, but the return on investment (RoI) for these solutions is low. Further, we are not able to sensitise our customers about this challenge.

We have started using analytics for improving energy efficiency in various site conditions through constant monitoring. A primary driver for analytics is the erratic nature of power outages. There is a need to constantly revise strategies for using diesel generators or battery backup in the most effective manner. This was previously done through an empirical analysis of past operations and is now being undertaken through network-linked analytics operations. We are currently performing anal­ytics at 50-60 per cent of our sites and have been able to identify the sizing errors in diesel gensets at specific locations.

Meanwhile, more and more indoor equipment is being transferred outdoors, thereby reducing air-conditioning costs. Also, the split radio concept is becoming increasingly popular, wherein part of the equipment is at the ground level or in the shelter and the remaining heat-dissipating elements are on the tower. This helps re­­­­­­­du­ce the power needs and the size of the diesel generator required at the telecom site.

As infrastructure providers, we are contractually required to provide four hours of battery back up to each telecom equipment consumer, and we have been sizing our battery and electrical systems on the basis of this requirement. However, we have realised that while batteries were initially envisaged to be deployed as back up power, they are now expected to function as a source of energy. To this end, custo­mers need to understand that battery is a storage device, which, when used effectively along with grid power, diesel generator sets and other sources of electricity, can bring down the overall electricity cost. Considering this, we will be able to take a conscious call on increasing the battery back up at certain locations and eliminating diesel generator operations. However, this may not be true for all grid power outage scenarios and holds true only in spec­i­fic scenarios. Legacy sites can witness some improvements in performance by increasing the battery back up.

The cost of storage including that of valve-regulated lead-acid batteries or lithium-ion batteries is not reducing. Costs are high because we are not able to reduce the procurement cost of batteries. We are also not getting sufficient returns on storage solutions as we are not able to factor in the increase in procurement costs and recover our energy costs from operators.

As far as the adoption of renewable en­er­gy solutions is concerned, GTL tried using solar power at around 100 sites. How­­ever, due to financial constraints, we did not take it beyond that. In the case of renewable energy, getting sufficient RoI is a challenging task. Moreover, the government mandate to use renewable energy solutions pertains only to the telecom industry. But it would make sense if the entire industrial sector, rather than only the telecom industry, addresses the carbon footprint issue. Further, with huge sums already invested in the telecom industry, there seems to be no space left for further investments without favourable RoIs. Only economies of scale in renewable energy deployment would be able to increase RoIs, which is difficult to achieve in the telecom industry as the towers are distantly located. Therefore, the industry has, for now, res­tricted renewable energy deployments.

“While batteries were initially envisaged to be deployed as back up power, they are now expected to function as a source of energy.” Tushar Kapadia

Shriprakash Tyagi

The non-availability of power continues to be a major challenge for the telecom infrastructure industry, despite an improvement in the situation in the past few years. In states like Bihar, grid-connected power is available for only four to five hours a day. We can adopt storage solutions, but they have a short life cycle (around four years in the case of batteries). Moreover, it is difficult to charge batteries regularly with low power availability. In order to optimise costs, we need to have grid-connected power for at least 20 hours a day.

We are taking several energy management initiatives and converting all our base transceiver stations from indoor to outdoor. For that, we are using different kinds of products like free cooling units, natural cooling units and micro cooling. As of now, about 40 per cent of our network is outdoors, for which no air conditioning is being undertaken. This helps save considerable energy. We are also using solar power at about 3,000 sites currently.

The fact that we have a distributed footprint complicates the task of energy management. The open access scheme can be availed of to address this issue, but it requires a minimum load of 1 MW. Even though the load of towers in one area is more than that of a bulk consumer, we cannot benefit from such schemes. We have requested the regulatory authorities to treat the load from all our towers as that from a single customer. For example, 200 sites using 20 kW each should be seen as having a load of 2 MW.

Meanwhile, since connection loads are small for a tower, typically 10 kW to 40 kW, net metering is profitable at telecom sites. We have begun pilot projects in states where net metering policies are out, but the issue of low RoIs exists here as well. Net metering is not feasible if grid power is not there. It is easier to work with private discoms since they have an automated metering system and are able to give us our bills on time.

“The non-availability of power continues to be a major challenge for the telecom infrastructure industry.” Shriprakash Tyagi