Green Telecom
On account of unreliable power conditions across the country, energy costs are almost 50 percent of the total operating cost of a site.
In a recommendation dated as early as 2012, TRAI said at least 50 percent of all rural towers and 20 percent of urban towers should be powered by hybrid power, comprising renewable energy technologies and grid power by 2015. Also, by 2020 hybrid-powered towers should go up to 75 percent for rural towers and 33 percent in case of urban towers.
The recommendations came in the wake of rising cost as well as environmental concerns on account of the diesel consumption by telecom towers. Estimates had then put the consumption of diesel by towers at around two billion liters per year, of which around 20 percent was estimated to have lost due to pilferage and other reasons. Further, the diesel spent significantly added to the carbon footprint of telcos, accounting for five million tons of CO2 per year. On account of unreliable power conditions across the country and the consequent high dependence on alternative power sources like diesel, energy costs are almost 50 percent of the total operating cost of a site.
Passive infrastructure services company Indus Towers had, in 2011, launched the Project Green City program, which now has resulted into more than 40,000 diesel-free sites.
Indus notes that it also undertakes other ways to reduce energy consumption and expenses by the use of technological solutions deployed at sites. For example, installation of Free Cooling Units at sites enables heat transfer between the ambient and shelter when the temperature is low, like during winters and at nights. This heat transfer results in reduced energy consumption and carbon emissions. The company had installed 15,000 such units. Additionally, 2,500 sites had smart battery charging solutions for faster charging, leading to energy savings.
Bharti Infratel, which had launched its GreenTowers P7 initiative in 2012, had worked towards converting sites into green sites. More than 3,400 sites had been tagged as green sites as of the previous financial year ended March 2014. The number of sites is expected to go up when the statistics for the recent fiscal are announced.
Also, Reliance Jio Infocomm, which is scheduled to launch its commercial 4G LTE operations in December 2016, was reportedly piloting solutions like Tower Tube in the Jharkhand telecom service area. These towers, which are also camouflage units, are understood to consume 40 percent less electricity and produce 30 percent less carbon emissions.
However, the greening of telecom in India certainly needs more acceleration and more active participation and involvement from stakeholders from the industry as well as the government. Particularly, government could consider actively incentivizing the use of green technologies in telecom, as it would also help develop the renewable energy sector in the country and even contribute to the government’s own goals of renewable energy generation. Given that the balance sheets of most of the telcos are highly leveraged on account of the debt taken for acquiring spectrum capacities over the past several rounds of auctions, they are not in a position to invest in green technologies unless they are more or less at par with the traditional technologies.