Greenpeace has come out with a report on adoption of renewable energy by telecom infrastructure companies to power their telecom towers.
As per the report, telecom companies can save about Rs 100 billion every year by using renewable energy to fuel their telecom tower sites. The report estimates that with government aiming to make telecom tower industry diesel free by 2020, about 12.5 per cent telecom towers need to be retrofitted with solutions that support renewable energy sources. The government will be able to save subsidies of Rs 2.73 billion per year on diesel with reduced use of diesel by the telecom tower companies.
The report states that currently India has 400, 000 telecom towers and over 70 per cent of theses are located in off-grid, rural and semi-urban locations. Greenpeace recommends telecom companies reduce diesel consumption in rural and semi-urban areas that account for 70 per cent of the total tower network in the country. As per the report out of 2, 80,000 towers, about 20 per cent are in areas where the average electricity supply is less than four hours.
By introducing clean fuel in these areas, tower companies can do away with an average of 390 million litres of diesel usage every year. By 2020, the diesel usage could be brought down to 3 billion litres to 3.2 billion litres. With an average, rural and semi-urban tower to be powered by renewable energy for eight to 10 hours, Greenpeace estimates that the telecom companies will require 640 MW of solar equivalent renewable energy to power their telecom sites.
According to the report, telecom companies need to invest Rs 83.6 billion per year and a total of Rs 670 billion by 2020 to replace the usage of diesel with renewable energy.
