In the past 2 years, a few mobile operators started to use renewable energy sources to power base stations. However the percentage of base stations out there is still too small. Operators and Vendors should work hand-in-hand to increase the usage of green-energy in their radio base stations. There are of course limitations, like in very cold places up north where in winter everything else is frozen.
Recently GSMA aims to use renewable energy sources to power up to 120,000 in 2012. It’s a big number but considering the current size of mobile networks, it can only compare to powering radio base stations in a single country such as Germany or France. NSN committed to having renewable energy sources as preferred power source on its radio base stations by 2011.
It’s all good, this movement to use green energy to power radio base station compared to consuming 20,000 litres of diesel fuel per year for every base station not connected to the power grid. The first step is to use renewable energy source in remote areas instead of diesel generator. This would mean wind or solar power in places where the climate is nice and warm. For the colder areas of the Nordic, perhaps its time to explore the use of snow as energy source, http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/international/2009/04/12/lah.japan.snow.as.energy.cnn which are in use in some parts of the world.
I encourage mobile network operators to extend the use of renewable energy sources to base stations connected to the power grid. These have the advantage of using green energy and at the same time sell excess energy generated back to the grid. Just imagine being “green” and making extra revenue at the same time… wouldn’t that be a win-win solution?
No comments:
Post a Comment