‘Power’ and ‘Telecommunications’ are the two key sectors which can enable inclusive growth through a connected ecosystem. While off-grid generation on tower sites can provide power for captive consumption, surplus could be channelized to neighboring remote villages, which suffer from long outages or complete absence of power. This could reduce the OpEx for operators, mitigate carbon emissions and change livelihood by paving way for rural electrification.
Despite the advent of 3G and 4G technologies, the Indian telecom sector is yet to realize its full potential. While there is ample growth in telecoms in the bigger cities of the country, rural India remains largely unconnected or inadequately connected to the national grid.
The telecom industry has been further struggling with critical concerns involving high OpEx on DG- run towers, right business model in low density areas, theft, land acquisition, compliances, spectrum constraints, burden of enhanced CapEx, etc, resulting in limited streaming of e-Governance, e-Health, e-Education and e-Commerce programmes in the country.
Solarisation
As solar power holds great potential to power green telecom, Solarisation of telecom towers could perhaps be the game- changer for service providers. It is scalable, efficient, clean, simple to deploy and fast becoming affordable. However, its adoption requires technology customization at various levels, funding support, accountability paradigms, clarity over business model and maybe incentives for large captive power users.
In the backdrop of the ‘Green telephony’ mandate released by Department of Telecommunications ( DoT) last year for using hybrid generation on 50% of towers in rural India and 20% in urban India by 2015, as well as the Power Ministry’s commitment to achieve 100 GW of solar generation by 2020, there is a need for structured intergovernmental and cross-industry collaboration.
The Green Telecom Towers 2014 Conference being held on 18 December 2014 at Hotel Le Meridien, New Delhi, is well –timed to explore the nuances challenging widespread adoption of green technologies in telecom tower sites.
This one day event is being organised by UBM Tech division Light Reading and mPower Connexions – with the objective to facilitate an enabling environment that promotes collaboration amongst multiple stakeholders involved in building telecom towers as a self-sustainable and carbon neutral infrastructure.
With a sharp and compelling content, the Conference Agenda has attracted widespread interest and support from nodal industry associations including Towers and Infrastructure Providers Association (TAIPA); Cellulars & Operators Association of India (COAI) and Alliances for Rural Electrification (ARE). Eminent speakers from the telecom and renewable energy sector including Rita Teotia, Special (Additional) Secretary, Department of Telecommunications, GoI; Tarun Kapoor, Joint Secretary, MNRE,A Robert J Ravi, Adviser TRAI; P Balaji, Director Regulatory & External Affairs, Vodafone; R N Nayak, CMD Powergrid; Naresh Kumar Gupta, Director CFA, BSNL; Prashant Singhal, Global Partner & Head Telecom Ernst & Young; Rajinder Singh, Executive Vice President –Central Operations Group, Corporate Technology, Vodafone; Rajan Mathew, Director General COAI; Sanjay Batra, VP Corporate Affairs Tata Tele& President AUSPI; Umang Das, Director General TAIPA & Chief Mentor Viom Networks will be part of the elite Speaker Faculty.
The upcoming conference will aim to deliberate on building viability and a prolific business case for the telecom industry. The stakeholders aim to jointly press for pinning a funding responsibility for enhanced CAPex and an accountability paradigm for systems integration. While US, China and Japan have given significant importance to Climate Change at G20 Summit by giving their commitment towards reducing carbon emission; it may just be the right time for the Indian government to evolve a dedicated Renewable Energy Act to accelerate adoption of green technologies. www.greentelecomtower.com
