Keeping it in the family: three generations of energy solution evolution

As towercos consolidate their portfolios and search for proven power solutions which fit with their need to reduce opex, Ausonia talk us through their long history in the market and how they developed both capex and full opex solutions to enable them to deliver power solutions to the complex African market. Drawing on over 80 years of R&D experience, Ausonia’s hybrid solutions are proving successful for both towercos and MNOs.

TowerXchange: Please introduce Ausonia – where do you fit in the telecoms infrastructure ecosystem? How did you get started in this business?

Ausonia has a very long history, we were the first company to produce diesel generators in Italy, starting our activities in 1932 thanks to the efforts of my grandfather. We are still a family company today and following the management of my grandfather and my father, I have now the role to lead and manage the company, keeping client satisfaction as our main priority.

Since the outset, we have continuously invested into R&D activities and we expanded our product portfolio to meet all the specific needs of our customers, who come from many different industries and countries, and who always need tailored products. Thanks to this, over the years we provided power solutions to critical sectors such as telecoms, oil & gas, defence, healthcare and many others. Specifically for the telecoms market, we provide different kinds of gensets for powering base transceiver stations, BSC/MSC, data centres – all kinds of cell sites, as well as mobile power units for energy recovery and no-break power systems for TOC sites. More recently, we added into our portfolio High Efficiency Power Units dedicated to remote areas and off grid, base transceiver station power supply applications. With such wide flexibility, we can definitively say that Ausonia is not only a product manufacturer, but it’s also a solution maker.

TowerXchange: How has Ausonia grown in the tower market and what has fuelled that growth?

Ausonia entered the tower market through the supply of power units to MNOs and towercos on a pure capex model basis. After many years of experience in this industry with this business model approach, in 2003 we got the opportunity to enter into a big challenge which definitively changed our way of approaching the telecoms market. That was when we were awarded a contract by Vodafone Italy for the supply of energy to their off-grid base transceiver station sites in Italy through a full opex business model. This was something new to us, but we structured ourselves in order to give Vodafone the utmost power availability on site and achieve their complete satisfaction for the energy services we had to provide.

We then created our energy service company (MediPower, ndr) and developed a genset model specifically designed around the needs of this activity and able to optimise our operational costs. Since then, we have continuously expanded this business by signing power lease agreements also with TIM, Wind (Vimpelcom) and H3G. Furthermore, in 2010, we have also developed a family of high efficiency diesel gensets solutions dedicated to off grid and bad grid cell sites, in order to further reduce our opex and share this advantage with the telecom operators, enjoying of a continuous growth which has been possible thanks to the high quality standards of our products and the excellent service levels offered to the Italian operators. Today we can say we power almost 85% of the off grid, base transceiver station sites in Italy. We realised that the solid experience we gained directly from the field could allow us to start offering and replicating the full opex business model also in foreign countries.

TowerXchange: How have you found customer response to Ausonia’s solutions in the African market?

Honestly, very positive and with excellent forecasts for the future. Being very flexible in our offer, going from a pure capex offer to the full opex business model, we can now satisfy different kind of demand for power.

After the testing we directly performed on the sites we service in Italy, we have today a proven technology which has been installed in several countries with different temperature, humidity and altitude scenarios, guaranteeing extreme reliability and power continuity.

Remember that we are not only a producer of these power solutions, but also first users in performing the energy service model, so we are perfectly aware of the importance of the reliability of a product, as well as its capability of maintaining unaltered performance over its lifetime. Our customers know this and in the recent years they asked us to provide them with our High Efficiency DC gensets, which are based on variable speed DC generator technology we developed internally in Ausonia for the telecom industry. With our units on their sites, our customers realised that this technology can guarantee them huge opex reductions, both in terms of fuel cost savings and number of maintenance and/or refueling trips to site.

They clearly understood our technology went beyond the typical concept of “hybrid solutions”, in which a genset needs to cycle with batteries in order to achieve the desired opex reduction. In fact, we are able to achieve even more savings than the typical hybrid power units available in the market by directly operating our variable speed DC generator, which automatically adjusts the engine speed according to the load existing on site and following the most efficient point of its power curve. All this is done without the necessity to add deep cycle batteries for CDC operation, and this makes our customers more than happy, especially when they think about their sites located in harsh climactic conditions, where they can eliminate the costs of the batteries and of the ACU needed for the battery cabinet, further reducing both the power and fuel consumption on site.

 

TowerXchange: In a sector where opex is kept to a minimum, can you talk us through the numbers which make your solution stack up? How does capex and opex compare?

There are multiple advantages to our high efficiency solutions for powering cell sites. Thanks to the significant reduction in  fuel consumption and different capacities of our integrated fuel tank, we can extend the refueling interval of our power units up to three to four months. On top of this, our high efficiency solutions can be configured to have a preventive maintenance interval of up to 2,000 hours, which is more than 80 days and requires only four or five trips to a site per year to perform maintenance activities.

Additionally the systems can be controlled and managed remotely through a web-based dedicated system which can be integrated to the Network Operation Centre (NOC) to track alarms, ticketing and escalation. Moreover, thanks to the scalability of our modular solution, we can deliver systems to power multi-tenant sites, in which each operator can be billed singularly for its energy consumption.

Considering all this, if our customers compare our DC gensets solutions with the traditional solutions installed around the globe, they realise that the payback period is often less than one year and the product lifetime goes over five years, making it therefore an excellent investment even in preparing short term business plans.

TowerXchange: Do you always work directly with the operator or towerco or do you also work closely with managed service providers in the market as well?

All these scenarios are possible in this market. We have supplied directly to operators when they owned the passive infrastructure assets, but we have sold our units also to towercos when the sites were on lease. In some other cases, we offered our solutions to local managed service providers who wanted to add a ‘plus feature’ into their current offers for services. So, I have to say we are totally open to work in all possible directions with any reliable partner, given for us it is mandatory that we have to keep our client happy – what’s best for them is also the best for us!