Enertika’s ESCO proposition for Europe and CALA

Last week I visited the Enertika’s offices in Barcelona to interview the company’s CEO, Francesc Tarongí, and discuss their energy saving proposition which has so far attracted among its client base Cellnex and Telefónica in Europe and in Latin America.

Enertika was created in 2008 and has over fifty highly qualified employees located in their offices in Spain, Guatemala, Mexico and Chile. So far, the ESCO has delivered great results to its clients which go beyond the telecom sector and include municipalities such as Barcelona and Madrid, automotive companies including Seat and utilities such as GasNatural Fenosa.

TowerXchange: Please tell us about Enertika’s energy efficiency proposition.

At Enertika we focus on reducing energy opex thanks to three separate solutions. On one hand, we are able to manage the overall energy consumption of base stations thanks to our IT platform, WATTABIT. Via its dashboard, we track detailed information with regards to the levels of consumption on each and every tower, weather conditions affecting it, the temperature at various points of the site as well as any other factors impacting the distribution and consumption of energy.

Being a remote system, we are able to easily access and track data for large portfolios of sites spread across distributed locations. Specifically, we receive data from each base station every fifteen minutes and we are alerted immediately in the event of over-consumption at any given site.

Secondly, we have developed a free cooling system that exploits natural refrigeration and maximises the advantages provided by climatic conditions in order to reduce the energy consumption of air conditioning hence the energy bill.

Lastly, we supply energy to our clients whose sites are located off-grid or linked to unreliable grids thanks to a combination of photovoltaic, battery and gensets solutions. Thanks to our energy solution, we’ve been able to ensure our clients savings to up to 60%.

TowerXchange: Can you share some insights with regards to your European projects?

So far, we’ve been active in Spain where we serve both Telefónica and Cellnex, and we are looking into Italy as well. In Europe, the ESCO model has been extremely well received especially since we partner with our clients and make the initial investment, hence relieving them from the capex element. In fact, our revenue is generated via the savings we ensure to our clients which represents for them a double incentive… Not only do they start saving from day one but additionally, they don’t have to pay for our services out of their pocket!

In Spain, we’ve supported Telefónica for its off-grid sites but most of our work is focused on the implementation of our solutions to reduce opex and energy consumption rather than providing energy since most sites are connected to the grid.

Especially since the advent of tower companies, there is a lot of attention on reducing opex and ensuring high level of efficiency at each site. Sustainability is an important factor, particularly for listed companies, but potential savings and competitiveness are key when making the decision to opt for an ESCO partner.

The European tower market has been flourishing over the past couple of years and now the creation of Telxius represents another opportunity to bring those assets to maximum efficiency levels. Optimisation is becoming a buzzword not only for towercos, who see towers as their number one income generator, but also for operators that decide to keep their towers but still aim to minimise their operational costs.

TowerXchange: Please tell us more about your operations in CALA.

In Central America we’ve initially thought we’d see higher level of demands for off-grid sites but in reality, just like in Europe, the electricity grid is quite efficient in major cities and suburban areas. And although rural areas aren’t well connected yet, we haven’t seen a lot going on there in terms of network densification. Penetration and smartphone adoption in those areas aren’t great yet and operators and towercos aren’t likely to commit to huge investments unless mandated by regulators.

On the other hand, CALA towercos and operators are generally very receptive when it comes to energy savings. You see, most MNOs in the region have developed their networks quite fast especially since competition is fierce. So lots of operators have found themselves with good sized networks in a relatively short period of time and haven’t necessarily paid enough attention to technical elements such as air conditioning and cooling systems.

Nowadays, MNOs are paying more attention to energy consumption especially since it’s such a burden on their balance sheets and are getting in touch with ESCOs to improve upon those obsolete systems that were implemented back then.

Most air conditioning solutions available in the market require some level of manpower to adjust the temperature according to climatic conditions or after maintenance has occurred on a site, which often results in the parameters being modified. At Enertika, we offer remote solutions for this problem since WATTABIT is able to modify the temperature at each base station without the need of any on site intervention. And when the tower is located in a remote part of Guatemala, remote management is particularly handy!

Other clients, such as the ones we are in discussion with in the Andean region, are now developing their networks for the very first time, which gives them a great opportunity to adopt state of the art systems such as Enertika’s.

So we are able to cater to both ageing networks with infrastructure whose energy consumption is affected by obsolete systems, and new installations where we can maximise energy efficiency from day zero.

TowerXchange: Can you share some practical details on how WATTABIT works?

First of all, we install a number of sensors on certain areas of the base station to track KPIs such as temperature, access, energy et cetera. And we also install an embedded PC on each site able to upload large volumes of data to the cloud.

This wave of data is received by our engineers which then can:

- Compare data related to consumption with what we receive from the utility company. In this case, we analyse the actual consumption with the one our client gets invoiced for and we are often able to identify a first gap. In this case, Enertika offers among its services to claim back the over-invoiced amount to the utility company on behalf of our clients.

- Detect simple and combined alarms on temperature, access, failures et cetera. The access element, to give you an example, is useful as we often track changes in temperature after the visit of maintenance inspectors which maybe prefer a cooler or warmer environment during their visit.

Our platform can fully integrate with existing RMS solutions and requires minimum maintenance. In fact, any software update is performed remotely and the only elements that require changing are the cooling filters which can be switched by any technician in charge of site maintenance.

In the case of off-grid sites, our system tracks the level of power generation and the status of each component such as batteries, gensets and the photovoltaic plant.

WATTABIT offers a very quick, easy to read overview of the project thanks to its dashboard, and then provides advanced functions such as analytics and tailor-made reports as requested by our clients.

TowerXchange: Which savings can your clients expect?

Savings vary region by region but we’ve seen them reaching 25% in CALA and around 18-22% in Spain. Enertika’s business model allows our clients to start saving from day one and we ensure them incremental growth on their savings and EBITDA whether their energy consumption needs are likely to increase or not.

We invest in projects with a minimum financial commitment of €1mn with estimated potential savings over 10% and where we can ensure pay-back time to be no longer than five years.