Alcatel-Lucent: First ‘on-grid’ alternative-energy cell sites on the horizon

Perhaps most significant, Alcatel-Lucent must draw on the vast range of alternative energy products originally designed for completely different industries and configure them for wireless use, Wauquiez said.

“The solar panel market is exploding, but the solar panels and equipment you put on the roof of your house may not be the right size or capacity necessary for a cell site,” Wauquiez said. “We’re doing the job of going to the market and applying the right technologies for telecom.”

The same goes for wind energy. Right now, a wind-powered cell site essentially requires two towers, the mast for the antennas and a separate spire on which to mount a turbine. Optimally, a wind mill can be incorporated into the tower itself, a design Alcatel-Lucent is currently developing. It’s also investigating ways solar panels could be optimized for the unique topology of the tower and batteries can be buried underground to keep them cool, Wauquiez said.

Wauquiez doesn’t expect there to be sudden explosion of US or European operators putting up windmills and solar panels in big cities, but he believes that there will be gradual transition among operators to mixed-use solutions. One of the key advantages to using alternative energy in areas that are on-grid is an operator can still utilize centralized power even if it is no longer the primary energy source. That approach simply reverses the equation rather than use the grid as the primary source and a localized solution—such as generators or batteries—as a back-up, alternative energy could become the primary source and the grid a back-up or supplemental source, Wauquiez said.

In areas where no grid is available, operators are forced to build power networks for the worst-case scenario. “You might have to deploy solar panels cover 100 square meters just because a few days out of the year might be sunny,” Wauquiez said. But if an operator can draw on the grid at night or during bad weather, it could reduce that solar footprint to 50 square meters, he said.

Wauquiez predicted that operators in the developed world will deploy alternative energy solutions at cell sites in three stages. First, they’ll look to the few areas so remote no grid is available. This has already started happening in the US. Sprint has deployed solar and wind-powered sites in remote region, creating self-sustaining sites capable of running independently for 30 days. It is also exploring using geothermal power in national parks and has started using fuel cells in many coastal sites in the hurricane-prone Southeast where storms can cut off power lines for weeks at a time.

Next, Wauquiez believes operators will start deploying alternative energy systems in areas where the power grid is available but renewable energy is abundant, such as the sun-drenched regions of the southwest or wind-swept central plains. These will be “best-effort” deployments which will use alternate power for the majority of the site’s power needs but fall back on the power grid when power supplies get low.

And finally, operators and tower companies will get into the power-generation business. As green energy technology gets cheaper and more efficient, sites will be able to store up excess energy, saving some of it for—quite literally—rainy days, but distributing much of it back into the energy grid, Wauquiez said. Wireless operators globally are in the unique position of owning highly distributed networks with hundreds of thousands of cell sites, which can act as gigantic distributed energy farms. All that is necessary to make such a scenario feasible is the right set of economic conditions and incentives, Wauquiez said.

“There are some favorable conditions and there are some conditions working against operators now,” Wauquiez said. “Once the return on investment is there, though, you will see this happen.”