The telecommunications sector has been the poster-boy of India’s growth story, witnessing remarkable user penetration over the last decade. Analysts have pegged that with every 10 per cent increase in mobile penetration, there is aresultant GDP growth of 1.2 per cent– leading to the development of other business modelsand improved access to the poor.

Today, with around 800 million subscribers, one can claim that cell phones have assumed importance as the fourth basic need after food, clothes and shelter. Almost 90 per cent of villages are covered by improved telecommunications facilities,which now empowerthe rural.

There however are certain stiff challenges faced by the telecom industry as part of providing access in these remote areas – the critical one being of providing 24x7 service uptime in areas where there is little or no grid electricity supply.

The power sector has clearly been unable to keep pace with telecom in terms of matching its penetration and reach. This bottleneck has forced telecom operators to rely on non-economical means of power and run sites on conventional sources of energy like diesel.This unfortunately not only spirals costs up by three to four times, but also puts enormous pressure on operations.

While operators and other organisations have extensively debated the use of alternate sources of energy, Bharti Infratel was the first telecom tower company to successfully implement green energy models at a wide scale. Infratel’s GreenTowers P7* initiative is a comprehensive energy efficiency and alternate energy programme covering 7 high impact projects, which are aimed at reducing diesel usage and therefore the carbon footprint. Infratel is currently the only telecom tower company, which has installed almost 3 MWT of solar capacity on our network, generating more than 5 million units of electricity every year. All this has been creditably achieved in spite of there being no subsidies on solar unit installations.

While the above efforts taken by Infratel have helped in establishing the credence of alternate energies,there are still a whole lot of challenges, which need to be overcome collectively, to take green energy to the next level.

The most enduring and sustainable solution however, would be to improve the availability and quality of grid power to enable communications reach across the country, while also powering other growth fronts for the rural sector. This will also help the telecommunications sector to concentrate on its core area of improving communications facilities, rather than investing time and money to study and maintain these energy technologies.

The industry should work towards collaborating with the MNRE, the Ministry of Power, and the other key players in the energy services sector to enhance priority power supply to the telecom sites with lowest possible carbon footprints. This effort should bring faster and economical results than diverting the focus of individual players in the telecom industry on setting-up and managing energy infrastructure. 

*Bharti Infratel’s GreenTowers P7 initiative is an award winning pioneering programme, which is aimed at adopting cleaner technologies as efficient energy alternatives, to power its telecom towers. To know more,please view: http://www.bharti-infratel.com/web/gogreen.html