Power-One designs and manufactures energy-efficient power conversion and power management solutions for renewable energy, and is one of Africa’s leading hybrid commodity suppliers. Power-One supplies through strategic partners to help MNOs and towercos reduce genset usage to 10-20% of current levels. TowerXchange spoke to Power-One’s Product Marketing Manager, Kai Hennum, about the company’s footprint in Africa and beyond.
TowerXchange: Thanks for speaking to us today. Please tell us where Power-One fit in the telecoms infrastructure ecosystem.
Kai Hennum, Product Manager, Power-One:
When towercos acquire assets from MNOs, their first priority is to reduce opex. Furthermore, MNOs are seeking to reduce opex, so they can extend services to low population density, low ARPU, increasingly remote areas.
With the continually increased cost of delivered diesel, problems with fuel theft and the watering down of diesel, cell sites currently running diesel gensets 24/7 have an incentive to retrofit with hybrid energy solutions. Hybrid energy allows the tower operator to switch off the genset, cycle the batteries, and reduce or even eliminate diesel consumption, slashing fuel costs and maintenance opex.
Power-One designs and produces rectifiers, controllers, inverters, converters and power system solutions around these. In the hybrid market, we are purely a commodity supplier and don’t have the infrastructure or inclination to take on end-to-end projects and turnkey management. So our strategic partners combine our products with batteries, RMS and subcontractor services.
Personally, I am responsible for the network power systems globally which includes our hybrid offering. For hybrid systems, the majority of deployments have, of course, been in Africa, and for our standard products we have a presence in the rest of EMEA and APAC as well as North and Central America, so we see South America as a major potential growth market for us, particularly for hybrid power systems.
TowerXchange: Where have Power-One’s solutions been installed in Africa?
Kai Hennum, Product Manager, Power-One:
Power-One had the first CDC trial system installed in Africa around 2007 and has since been developing a standard system portfolio for CDC and Solar. The promotion and trialing of hybrid solutions during the last six to seven years since has mainly been with African MNOs and towercos through regional partners. We used to joke that there seemed to be more trial hybrid cell sites in use in Nigeria than non-trial sites! Tower operators are increasingly convinced that hybrid is the right technology choice to reduce energy opex.
Power-One works with integrator partners to supply some of the main towercos in Africa for countries like Uganda, Tanzania and DRC. More recently, we have provided the equipment for hybrid solar sites in Nigeria and for pure solar as well which is an interesting development. We are gaining information that will serve to improve performance and we are experiencing an increase in demand for pure solar.
Power-One solar and genset hybrid solutions have been rolled out in the Niger Delta, helping to eliminate fuel requirements at a lot of sites. Diesel deliveries in this area had been subject to shall we call them “unofficial local taxes”, while some roads are impassable for six months a year during the rainy season. So these kinds of smaller, more difficult to access sites are ideal for solar hybrid.
Our models show that a lot of regions of Africa are generally suitable for solar, then we can use simulation and RoI tools to evaluate which is the best solution for each specific site location. With many years of experience in Africa under our belts, Latin America will be an excellent opportunity for us to share our extensive knowledge base with the regional partners there.
TowerXchange: What information does the tower operator need to evaluate a location for solar?
Kai Hennum, Product Manager, Power-One:
Obviously, the most important evaluation is to establish that the site has exposure to the sun. For Africa, the conditions for solar are good but on a local level there could be shading and other conditions that come into play which can have considerable effects on the solar contribution and hence the RoI.
Also, there is the practical aspect of having the space available for the panels. In some RFQs, we have seen that several football fields of solar panels would be needed to cover the load and battery autonomy requirements, so often we had to bring the expectations/specifications down to a realistic level after our internal review and simulations.
Furthermore, the battery autonomy requirements can represent practical limitations, particularly for pure solar since a lot of solar power is needed when it is the only energy source and batteries need to be recharged regularly.
In the early days, we spent a lot of time calculating RoI, HOMER modeling, etc in order to find the optimised system setup for specific sites. Nowadays, and particularly for the towerco business this is either part of the scope for the towerco itself or for the integrators/turnkey supplier while our involvement is to configure our standard products accordingly. The knowledge base has changed completely during the last three to four years; typically when a request for a hybrid system comes to us the customers nowadays usually know what they want. We do have extensive simulation tools enabling us to model hybrid system performance to a high degree of accuracy and advise what the performance of a system solution will be.
TowerXchange: How do the different renewable energy sources for cell sites compare?
Kai Hennum, Product Manager, Power-One:
We have experience with wind and fuel cells. The obvious reason solar is more appealing is that solar panels are cheaper than wind turbines. Solar panel costs have come down substantially over the last two to three years. Wind hybrid solutions suffer in comparison because wind turbine manufacture is not as commoditised as solar. This makes it difficult to offer a relatively cost competitive wind power solution. It seems like every wind power site needs to be customised which, together with the capital cost of the equipment, limits market acceptance of wind power to date. And on a basic level, sunshine is more predictable than wind!
The GSMA Green Power stats show that most green cell sites are generator optimised, with the second most being solar hybrids, and a distant third group of wind plus solar plus CDC sites, most of which are still in trials.
Another challenge is that wind turbines seldom go to a specification low enough for a 1.5-2kW cell site. Generally, there isn’t a huge amount of wind in Sub-Saharan Africa, a few coastal areas notwithstanding.
The fuel cell solutions I’ve seen in India where they’ve deployed two meter high cabinets full of twenty hydrogen cylinders to give maybe 72 hours of standby time on a cell site are not feasible for use in Africa and other locations. 72 hours is not a lot when we’re trying to reduce generator runtime by 75% or more.
Fuel cells might work at sites with permanent gas supplies. It’s certainly a green method, but it only really works at sites with high grid availability and reliability. Fuel cells work best with 95%+ mains availability, and might perhaps be viable in certain parts of North Africa and South Africa.
Even in Europe, the fuel cell powered sites I’ve seen feature large separate rooms for hydrogen storage. Replacing diesel with hydrogen also doesn’t take away the fuel logistics costs.
We have yet to do detailed analysis for the South American continent but the assumption is that the demand split between CDC, Solar hybrid, Wind and “other” will be more or less in line with what we have seen in Africa and other regions, with CDC and Solar representing more than 90% of the overall demand.
TowerXchange: What typical capex outlay is required to retrofit a site with hybrid energy, and how does that compare to greenfield sites?
Kai Hennum, Product Manager, Power-One:
Retrofitting a site is more complex as there is often an incentive to use what is already there, which again leads to more ad hoc power solutions for each site. More commonly though, the old power system is shut down and the site is re-wired to the new hybrid equipment which is often a low footprint outdoor enclosure. Tower operators will often ask the contractor to take old rectifiers back to their warehouse for use on legacy sites. So end to end turnkey retrofits are often more expensive than greenfield installations.
At greenfield sites we’re seeing a focus on ease of deployment and installation with less concrete civil works buildings, and more use of outdoor equipment – compact, cabinetised, and fitting in smaller areas or with containerised solutions. For solar, it is very common to house the power equipment in a small enclosure that is placed under the panels.
As for the capital outlay, this of course depends on variables such as solar power percentage etc. At a 1.5-3kW site you’re probably looking at US$15-20,000 or upwards inclusive of new equipment, shipment, installation, and removal of old equipment. Based on a cost per delivered liter of diesel of US$1.50, you’re looking at RoI in around 12 months.
Costs are going to vary for demographic reasons and other factors, for example a lot of the logistical costs are higher in Nigeria whether it’s something as simple as hotels being expensive or something as fundamental as the road network being under-developed but again such variables are typically evaluated in a lot of details by the towercos themselves.
TowerXchange: Given that towercos seldom upgrade capacity before additional tenancies are sold, how do you support the modular approach towercos take to power systems?
Kai Hennum, Product Manager, Power-One:
Fundamentally, our system solution caters for either considering future load/tenant increase at the time of deployment, or to add this on in the field as tenancies are added. Retrofitting is not as cost effective as building in the capacity from the outset as it requires a return visit to the site, it is also a more labor intensive installation and hence more prone to mistakes.
Retrofitting is not as cost effective as building in the capacity from the outset as it requires a return visit to the site, it is also a more labor intensive installation and hence more prone to mistakes
We recommend that more power shelves are included for additional converters, and expand with additional modules only as they go along. However, for towercos keeping a tight reign on capex investments until tenancies are secured, it’s often the preferred solution to deploy with a cost optimised system setup. For the same reasons, CDC is often deployed to achieve immediate opex reductions with a minimal capex investment with solar being added later on, similarly with our modular approach, this allows adding on solar capacity along the way in order to further reduce the genset duty cycle and opex.
TowerXchange: Finally, can you sum up how Power-One differentiate yourselves from your competitors?
Kai Hennum, Product Manager, Power-One:
As a commodity supplier with more than twenty years of experience in the telecom power systems industry, we have combined our experience with knowledge from our renewable energy activities and believe that we have developed a portfolio of hybrid power systems tailored particularly for telecom applications that very few vendors are able to match. In particular, we have invested a lot of time and resource on understanding the battery technology that is typically deployed for off grid and hybrid solutions and have implemented complex algorithms to ensure optimised battery lifetime.
We then tie up with strategic partners as we don’t want to be a turnkey supplier. Other equipment manufacturers are trying to get into the service space, where the value of deals is certainly bigger. Power-One just supplies equipment, and will sign non-circumvention agreements. A big turnkey project can take a month to put together, in which time we can supply equipment to five or six strategic partners – we have the capacity to work on a greater number and variety of different projects. So our partners today know we won’t be in competition with them for service contracts tomorrow.
