The problem nowadays is that everybody wants to see the decreasing of conventional energy usage in really big steps which in most cases require high investments. Only a few think starting with small steps. Have you ever thought of reducing the consumption of diesel fuel required to power generators from the cellphone towers? Neither have I.
Cellphone towers need 3-5 KW of electricity every hour, depending on the number of operators that use it. Taking India as an example, the total number of towers is around 250,000 and these consume about 2 billion litres of diesel fuel every year(530 million gallons every month). Not quite negligible after all.
That is why The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy of the Indian government will present a mandate that would require telecom operators to use solar panels to power their cellphone towers. This will dramatically reduce
the carbon footprint and will make a huge difference in long term. Just doing a simple math operation you’ll find out that the total carbon emissions from cellphone towers only in India is 11.76 billion pounds or 5.3 million tons annually.
After China, India is the second largest and fastest growing telecom market. At this moment, there are around 500 million mobile phone subscribers and a growth will also increase the consumption of diesel. It is expected that by 2015 India will have around 1 billion mobile phone subscribers which means at least another 250,000 towers. The ministry also aims to get up to 20,000MW of electricity from solar power by 2022.
