Despite the ongoing rhetoric by the ICT industry to reduce its carbon footprint and adopt more environmentally friendly technologies, the main driver behind the roll out of renewable energy cell sites by mobile operators is still very much about power and cost.

While there’s much discussion by industry initiatives such as the Green Power for Mobile program by the GSMA, the primary motivator for cell sites with wind, or solar, or both, remains the lack of availability of traditional power solutions and the reduction of operational costs, and not so much to combat climate change.

According to Pete Bishop, chief technology officer at power systems specialist, PowerOasis, the factor that most influence an operator’s decision to roll out renewable energy sites is money, not so much corporate social responsibility, with the situation accentuated by the global downturn last year.

“It’s all about return on investment and what you’ve seen over the past year is the operators looking more and more short term then they were a few years’ ago. So when we first started, we can show a 5 year return on investment and people are interested, now it has to be less than two years, and even one year,” Bishop told us at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, adding that the trend has effectively reduced the number of sites that fit the formula.

However, that doesn’t mean renewable energy for cell sites is being ignored as a solution. The fact remains, Bishop notes, that renewable energy is sometimes the only solution for setting up sites in remote areas without grid access.

“In any network, there’ve got sites that are difficult to access, a long way from the grid. In the regions that we are talking about [emerging markets], this can be 10% of the network, so it’s a significant number of sites,” he said. “In many locations it is the only way of doing it, the early adopters now are the immediate market, and you know, rapidly behind that now, is locations like India, China, Pakistan, where they are having increasing problems with availability.”

Interestingly, there are now new reasons for adopting renewable energy – carbon trading and feed-in models for electricity consumptions.

“Carbon trading is also out there. We are also seeing feed-in tariffs now starting to play a part, which can mean it is actually worth putting in a larger wind turbine and solar array that is needed to run the site and the benefitting from the feed-in tariff back into a grid connection,” he said. “There are a couple of States in the US now have brought in favourable feed-in regimes, like California and New England, it is that kind of encouragement really from a government level that will tip the balance in favour of these solutions. The sites that have an unreliable grid connection can show a much better return by putting in this kind of infrastructure. There is a CSR aspect to it, but the primary driver is to make it work.”

At the end of the day, it will take a major shift in cost structures for the widespread adoption of renewable for mobile networks. Bishop points to the fact that renewable energy solutions still have a lot of room for improvement.

“They are all fairly early stage technologies. We are seeing year on year improvements and there is significant potential. I think that will continue for some years,” Bishop said. What PowerOasis has done is make its systems more or less vendor agnostic, and to set up a certification program for emerging renewable energy solutions, so operators have a guideline as to which equipment will work with PowerOasis’ solutions.

“We are constantly evaluating new wind turbine designs. PV panels are much more a commodity but there are some technologies coming, and as they become available, we will qualify them into our solution. The main thing is testing and certifying a reference set of components together so there’s no risk for an operator in terms of component selection because they would be pre-validated with our solution.”