Ascot: All in one, plug & play hybrid generator with solar and AC/DC generators for mobile telecom sites

With eight years of experience and thousands of installations in critical markets throughout Africa, Middle East and Europe, the Ascot Hybrid is considered one of the most reliable and proven hybrid solutions on the market. Approved and widely used by the Vodafone Group, Helios Towers Africa, IHS Tower, STC Saudi Telecom, Ooredoo, Zain and Sudatel in their critical operations, it is confirmed as the right product for harsh environments such as in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Sudan. Ascot’s certified performance has been proven over eight amassed years of data thanks to a sophisticated and efficient remote control system embedded in the Ascot Hybrid.

TowerXchange: Please introduce where Ascot Industrial fits into the telecoms infrastructure ecosystem.

Choosing Ascot today means trusting an organisation with a 27 years’ experience in the international market with a brand name which is a by word for quality and reliability.

Our typical products include hybrid generators, AC and DC generators which are designed by a team of in-house highly skilled engineers in accordance with our customers’ specifications.

Telecommunication companies historically recognise Ascot as a leader in the sector thanks to its innovative products and technologies for generators and for the family of hybrid solutions deployed globally in 38 countries.

This is the true know-how of Ascot competence and flexibility, it’s only by visiting remote sites and looking at how they are configured that we can apply our know-how to optimise that site to benefit both the operator and ourselves!

TowerXchange: How did Ascot Industrial get into the hybrid energy for telecoms market?

From the inception of Ascot Industrial from 1986 until 2000, our core business was developing generators for military, defence, power plants and marine applications, the defence sector has been for us like Formula One is to Ferrari – a cutting-edge R&D function which we’ve now applied to the telecoms sector. For example, back in 1997 we developed an application to charge the huge batteries on submarines whilst they were harboured. Ten years later I was speaking with a manager from Zain, who challenged me to produce an engine with low fuel consumption to power his cell sites. At first I thought it was impossible, but from his words came the idea to apply the same technology we used to charge submarine batteries to charge cell site battery banks, even when the generator is switched off.

Having proven our application worked at a large scale to charge the submarines batteries, it was relatively simple to adapt it to charge the 600-1550amp batteries at cell sites, and we quickly developed and sold our first hybrid solution in 2008, which was installed in very harsh conditions in Sudan.

Between 2008 and 2009 we installed 15 units in 15 different countries for different telecom operators, so we proved the solution in different temperatures, humidity’s and altitude scenarios – it was a good challenge, so we invested in the project.

When we were working with the operators in the field, Ascot was fixing the problems of today and of tomorrow. Ascot is now positioned to meet the specific needs of telecoms. A cell site in the desert is like a forward communication base in a war – reliability is critical and maintenance visits must be kept to an absolute minimum. As competition becomes more aggressive in telecoms, particularly in Africa, the battle will be won by whoever can provide the best service at the lowest OpEx, so it’s critical to improve energy efficiency.

TowerXchange: Why do telecom operators need to reduce opex?

The role of the operators is to generate profit from phone calls and to increase the number of subscribers in order to gain more market share than their competitors; to do so they need to have a reliable network operating at the lowest possible opex.

A decade ago when the competition was minimal, operators expanded rapidly and the cost of phone calls was high. At that time operators did not pay very much attention to opex, instead concentrating on building their infrastructure rather than finding an optimised power solution. Very inefficient energy solutions, based on standard diesel generators as the primary energy source, were installed with very high servicing costs - especially for off grid sites.

The golden era is now over. Nowadays to remain competitive in the future the operators have to find and implement new strategic energy solutions to have lower opex than their competitors.

The phone tariffs and the revenue generated by the telecom operators has a direct impact on opex, in fact only with lower expenditure and reliable service can the operator decrease the call tariffs, acquire more subscribers and generate more revenue.

TowerXchange: Can you tell us more about the hybrid solutions already in the market?

As hybrid technology is relatively new, today’s market offers different solutions made by combining different brands of products to form a hybrid package (ie. Controller X, Batteries Y et cetera). The result of that mixing is that the manufacturer of each single part guarantees their part as a stand alone and not associated with other components, hence the controllers available on the market are not specifically designed for the scope, the integration of the parts to combine in a hybrid package can result in cell site energy being very expensive and inefficient, and with no single point of accountability.

The innovative ASCOT patented DC-HPU is an integrated ‘plug & play’ power solution designed to supply energy to telecommunication sites using 68% less fuel than the current diesel generating sets running 24 hours a day and using up to 98% less fuel when integrated with solar solutions.

TowerXchange: How has your offering evolved as the African tower market changes?

In the last couple of years hybridisation has attracted the increasing interest of the telecom operators. They have pushed the market to propose hybrid solutions to power their sites. However to replace a traditional generator with a hybrid solution is not easy because most of the current hybrid solutions on the market are new and also the local maintenance teams are not prepared to manage these sophisticated systems. Operators want hybrid power solutions but as they are new, when they install it they can face a lot of problems as they don’t fully understand how it works.

To overcome that resistance, today Ascot offers a plug & play hybrid solution, which utilises the same interface as standard generators  (typically a DeepSea Control Card) that can dialogue with the internal logic.

In addition to that, today we include a service called ‘Flying Doctors’ which means that once our clients have purchased the technology we can offer installation, training and operational support, together with the package for the technology (for example we used this on the 1,500 sites we recently upgraded for Vodacom). We now also offer a package where our team and local partner will go side by side installing the machines and doing onsite training in order to guarantee the machines’ installation and performance. We use this team to identify the main difficulties faced in the field by our clients. Our ‘Flying Doctors’ team report back this information which immediately allows us to improve the difficulties faced in operations, For example, if they don’t like the control panel we can change it to work better for them. This helps us to provide our clients with the solutions they need.

For tower operators we have integrated a distribution box which had not existed until now, meaning the client had to supply it. Now it’s integrated into the system so the output of the machines matches the output for the tenants so you can have one, two or more different tenants. It’s a market proven product especially in Africa; network owners like Helios Towers Africa and Vodacom are using our hybrid systems and are making referrals and giving references to use Ascot products as they are so easy to install, manage and maintain. Our solution easily integrates with PV or wind power so these energy sources can plug and play with our machine. We’re also offering a remote monitoring and control system so our clients can remotely manage the performance of our machines.

Ascot is a manufacturing company so our business model before was just to supply the equipment and leave the client to organise other details - namely financing packages. Now some clients want a capex-based model and some want an opex model with integration in a financial package. We can now offer both and have the flexibility to provide what our clients desire.

TowerXchange: How do hybrid solutions compare to running diesel generators 24/7?

68% is the magic number of fuel savings that are achievable with the Ascot Hybrid and you can reach 98% in combination with a Solar PV System.

Telcos were only using diesel generators off grid because there were no other financially viable solutions until recently.

When a consumer goes out to buy a hybrid car, the hybrid vehicles he considers are not in competition with normal cars – they are serving different needs, and there is no comparison on fuel consumption.

Telecoms are like the automotive industry – in the future no-one will use diesel (or petrol) engines – hybrid power is the future. Why don’t people use hybrid now? Price, performance and availability – and Ascot are at the forefront of improving all three.

Telecoms operators want hybrid power already, but like consumers changing their normal car for a battery car, they want to know how it will affect their operations – they want to be sure and when telecoms operators are sure hybrid power works, it will be only a matter of time before all off grid and unreliable grid cell sites are upgraded to hybrids.

Essentially hybrid solutions are big battery chargers – their role is to produce, store and reuse energy. As the price comes down and the performance and reliability is proven, the business case for hybrid energy becomes more compelling at more and more cell sites.

There will be a tipping point where demand for hybrid rises very quickly. At the moment innovators are still finding competitive advantages, which they don’t want to share, but when innovations are collated, everyone will want it and it will stimulate that big jump in demand. Investors aren’t afraid of those consolidated technologies.

TowerXchange: How do the power requirements differ between single and multi-tenant cell sites?

Towercos often have to invest in power solutions before they know how many tenants will be on the tower, and before they know their total power requirements.

So energy systems for shared sites need to be modular, with a low initial CapEx investment for single tenant sites, and a small increase in investment for each additional tenant. Towercos don’t want to deploy the CapEx to support multiple tenants right away, they need scalable modules with a few small extra parts for additional tenants. Ascot’s tested and proven power solution for towercos, our Modular DC-HPU for one to three BTS of up to two KW, has an engine capable of supplying power to three banks of batteries, so the main change to accommodate multiple tenants is to add extra battery stacks. We also enable metering to bill tenants for their own energy consumption.

TowerXchange: Tell us about the innovative LPG solutions Ascot is bringing to the market?

Our innovations are always driven by market demand. Today the main challenges are fuel theft and the possibility of delivering our systems to remote and difficult areas. To overcome these challenges we have developed a range of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) hybrids – we now offer LPG powered engines. In markets like Nigeria for example gas is cheap and easily available, it’s also far more complicated to steal. The LPG hybrid project was developed for the US market and now we’re making it available for the African market where we foresee a lot of uses.

In terms of delivering the system to remote areas we have also solutions to offer, today we offer two solutions: a semi-knock down product that can be hand carried and then easy reassembled on site and a containerised cargo package, that is a complete and mobile telecom site; both are effective and requested solutions.