Self-sustaining mobility

The alternative energy mobile network seems to have plenty of momentum in the savannahs of Africa, the villages of India and the mountains of Tibet, but when will achieve that kind of momentum in the U.S.? To be fair, there have been some interesting “green” deployments at home. Operators have powered cell sites in remote areas on geothermal power and wind or have replaced diesel backup generators.

But for the most part, those deployments have been few and they follow the same economic criteria as their developing country counterparts: Carriers are turning to alternative energy solutions where there is no access, or unreliable access, to a centralized or backup power source. Many of those cell sites are going up in places like national parks, which have no access to the energy grid, and fuel cells are being deployed in hurricane-prone communities in the Southeast, where getting a reliable diesel supply is difficult during a natural disaster.

This isn't a criticism, merely an observation, but it does raise an interesting question. Do the green initiatives the mobile industry appears to be embracing end at the power line?

Operators aren't going to move their cell sites off the power grid — where it is available — anytime soon. A direct connection to a centralized power source is the cheapest and most efficient means for an operator to power its network today. The economic incentive simply isn't there and neither is the pressure from environmental groups or agencies. Gartner estimates that the entire information and communications technology industry accounts for only 2% of global carbon emissions. The wireless industry contributes just a fraction to that total, and according to Ericsson the transportation of manufactured wireless equipment around the globe is responsible for a good deal of those emissions. A mobile network operator isn't contributing an outsized share to the world's global warming problems.

It does seem, though, that wireless is in an interesting position to become a global test case for sustainable industry. Vendors have driven power efficiency and alternative energy advancements far in recent years, primarily to meet the problems of deploying in the developing world. Those technologies now are eking into the developed world. Furthermore, the wireless network, due to the distribution of its infrastructure, is an ideal candidate to test out new ideas in decentralized power. The monumental power needs of a Google data center can't be met with an array of solar panels, but a single base station among a network of tens of thousands could. Going off the grid entirely might not be a near-term possibility, but becoming partially self-sustaining might. Solar panels mounted on every cell tower would be a start — it's not as if they would make them any uglier.

Of course, the underlying incentive to move to a self-sustaining technologies isn't yet there, but it could be one day. The reason why most operators in the developing world are moving toward renewable power sources, away from generators, isn't an overpowering sense of global responsibility. They're being killed by the cost of diesel fuel. Energy costs in the U.S. will likely rise, just as the cost and operational difficulty of deploying green technologies will fall. Combine those with the operators growing environmental awareness and the possibility of government incentives and we may soon reaching a tipping point where the self-sustaining network makes more economic sense than a grid-powered one.