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Greenpeace report urges telecom companies to shift to renewable energy
The paper reveals cellular service providers to be the biggest consumer of diesel after railways in India
Ajachi Chakrabarti
New Delhi
A recent report released by Greenpeace calls for cellular service providers to use renewable sources of energy for their mobile towers in order to reduce the industry's high consumption of diesel, which is the second highest in India after the railways.
Releasing the report, titled 'Enabling Clean Talking', former secretary to the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy Deepak Gupta said that bringing an attitudinal change in corporations and people is the biggest challenge faced by advocates of renewable energy sources. He added that such a shift was necessary as mobile network operators are an undeserving beneficiary of the government subsidy on diesel. “If global crude oil prices went up by 25 percent, the government would go bankrupt,” he said.
Presenting the extent of the dependence on diesel, the report says that with 951 million subscribers in India, the telecom industry has set up over 4 lakh cellular towers that require round-the-clock electricity, but nearly 70 percent of those are situated in areas with inadequate power, which necessitates the use of diesel generators. It says that approximately 3.2 billion litres of diesel was consumed by the industry last year, which is estimated to grow to 6 billion litres by 2020. Such a situation would cause nearly 8.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, it says.
“There is a strong economic case to be made for shifting to renewable sources,” said Venu Gopal of Energy Alternatives India (EAI), one of the authors of the report. “Operational expenses of cellular towers that depend on diesel generators are between Rs14 and Rs15 per unit in the best case,” he said, adding that with the added expense of transporting diesel and pilferage of the fuel, this figure often reached Rs 40 per unit. Solar energy, he said, costs about Rs 11 to 12 per unit, while biomass can be used to produce electricity even cheaper.
The reason companies were not willing to adopt the proposed approach—as well as a TRAI directive to telecom companies to shift to greener technology—is because they are not willing to commit the high initial costs for installation of these technologies, which can be around Rs 1.5 lakh per tower on an average, he said. “Companies are looking only at the short term, and we need to come up with a roadmap through which they can make this shift,” said Mrinmoy Chattaraj, a Greenpeace campaigner who is the other author of the report.
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