The Government of India has set key targets for a digital nation where success depends on various factors, including the deployment and maintenance of sustainable infrastructure backbones. The creation of a roadmap for enhanced grid capacity, as well as the use of renewable energy solutions and their integration to the grid are key. With energy playing such a critical role in powering telecom towers across the country, the India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA) is seeking to enhance its partnerships with towercos and MNOs to drive technology adoption that supports uptime, carbon reduction and opex savings.
TowerXchange: Please introduce yourself, your role and the Alliance.
Debi Prasad Dash, Director of India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA):
I am the Director of the India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA). I lead IESA’s involvement in policy recommendations for the energy storage roadmap across the country. Additionally IESA works to create policy for advanced energy storage technologies and development of ancillary markets in India and to establish new strategic partnerships with key industrial players.
IESA was launched in 2012 to accelerate the market development for energy storage technologies in India, through an active dialogue among the various stakeholders. Over the past five years, IESA has worked diligently with policy makers, industry stakeholders and consumers to create awareness, with an eye to transforming India’s electric grid in the coming decade and to support the vision for 2030 and 2050 of smart cities, with maximum deployment of renewable energy resources.
Today, IESA has become the leading body to address the need for a robust energy storage ecosystem in the country. It has set a mission to make India a global hub for research and manufacturing of advanced energy storage technologies by 2022.
IESA has strategic alliances with over 20 global and national associations including China National Energy Storage Alliance (CNESA), Energy Storage Alliance–USA (ESA), California Energy Storage alliance (CESA), Germany Energy Storage Alliance (BVES), Energy Storage Canada (ESC), Australian Energy Storage Alliance (AESA), Indian Electrical and Electronics Manufacturers Association (IEEMA) among others.
TowerXchange: What are some statistics you can share with us on energy in India? And why is energy storage important?
Debi Prasad Dash, Director of India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA):
The Government of India’s focus on attaining ‘power for all’ has accelerated capacity addition across the country. In September 2017, the Government of India launched the Saubhagya scheme to provide electricity connections to over 40mn families in rural and urban areas by December 2018 at a cost of US$2.5bn. As of December 2017, the total installed capacity of power stations in India stood at 330,860MW.
Energy storage technologies have huge potential to significantly contribute to the transformation of the Indian electric grid towards a greener, more resilient and reliable grid within the next decade. Advanced energy storage technologies can play an important role in renewable integration, energy access, electric mobility and smart cities initiatives organised by the Indian Government.
Grid operators have always been looking for ways to safely and efficiently store energy so that it can be supplied and consumed on demand. Over 20 different types of grid scale energy storage technologies are either commercially available and/or are under development across different regions worldwide. This includes mechanical storage like pumped hydro storage, flywheels, compressed air and electrochemical storage such as lead acid, advanced lead acid, lithium-ion chemistries, sodium-based batteries, nickel-based batteries and flow batteries.
According to the IESA estimates, India has potential to integrate over 300 GWh of energy storage during 2018-25. This will include existing applications such as backup power but also newer applications like wind and solar integration, frequency regulation, peak management, transmission and distribution deferral, diesel replacement and electric vehicles.
Energy storage market, India, 2018-2025 (300 Gwh)
The Government of India has released its roadmap to achieve 175 GW capacity in renewable energy by 2022, which includes 100 GW of solar power and 60 GW of wind power. With the rapid reduction of solar and wind energy costs, the Indian grid now needs solutions for renewable integration. This transition is supported by significant push for Giga factories for advanced energy storage technologies such as lithium-ion that is driving down the cost of energy storage at a pace even faster than the solar PV cost reductions witnessed in past decade.
TowerXchange: What are some of the biggest challenges when it comes to energy storage from the telecoms industry perspective?
Debi Prasad Dash, Director of India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA):
In order to tap the huge potential for energy storage in the Indian telecom tower market, there are several issues that need to be solved. There are different configurations for telecom towers in terms of number of base transceiver stations (BTSs), load requirement, grid power availability and prevailing weather conditions. Therefore, companies need to try different permutations and combination to find the ideal storage solution for a particular site.
Furthermore, available storage technologies do provide better efficiency but in turn, they require higher capex which impacts the return of investment. Storage solutions can be a win-win strategy only if the costs and benefits are shared between telecom operators and their towercos. Moreover, there are issues related to the suitability and compatibility of new technologies with the existing tower site infrastructures, as well as limited field support.
Challenges (operational and technical):
- Not all the batteries are monitored remotely due to high cost of battery management systems (BMS) which lead to gaps in enforcing warranties with suppliers.
- Telecom tower backup batteries are subject to harsh temperature conditions on account of lack of monitoring, which leads to a decrease in their operational life.
- Currently the trend with telecom operators/towercos is to engage energy storage technology vendors on a pure opex model ($/kWh) of backup power per month with real-time monitoring solution. This becomes a major hurdle for new storage technologies to be rolled out on a large-scale due to financing limitations.
TowerXchange: What are some of the initiatives underway to drive improvements?
Debi Prasad Dash, Director of India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA):
With a subscriber base of nearly 1.19bn, as of December 2017 per the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the country accounted for the second largest telecom network in the world.
As the deployment of micro base stations increases, lithium-ion batteries will serve as the best power solution as their light weight would allow them to be easily lifted to the micro base stations’ vertical deployment. Getting rid of diesel generators (DG) altogether will take many years; meanwhile, the need of the hour is to optimise DG usage by deploying these systems in hybrid form with other technologies.
In the future, a hybrid technology that addresses the cost-effectiveness and challenges of all of these technologies needs to be developed as a viable option for the telecom tower industry.
India is actively working on electric vehicles adoption and telecom towers near the highways can play a role as charging stations. This needs to be evaluated and studied.
Energy storage solutions will play a key role, especially with industry players showing a commitment to the deployment of green energy technologies. And towercos will be at the forefront of that development.
It should be however noted that India is home to well-matured profit making towercos compared to other countries in Asia and can lead the way to a large-scale energy storage deployment, which can in turn also open new revenue streams for towercos by participating in the distributed utility grid ancillary services markets.
In addition, the telecom industry is at the forefront of implementing the government’s Digital India and the Smart Cities projects. Achieving the goals underlying these programmes would require the deployment of a variety of infrastructure solutions, including macro towers, micro sites as well as fiberised backhaul networks.
TowerXchange: Do you have any case studies and/or success stories you could share with us?
Debi Prasad Dash, Director of India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA):
Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, the telecom arm of Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Industries had placed an order worth US$40mn for lithium-ion battery in 2013-14 with SAFT and similar orders with EXICOM, Coslight and others.
The batteries used at its mobile tower sites were used for meeting the operator’s power requirements. Hereafter, other companies like Indus Tower and Bharti Infratel also started installing lithium-ion batteries for telecom towers in India. Exicom Tele Systems, an IESA member company, already installed lithium-ion batteries in more than 50,000 telecom towers. Some of the major reason for these adaptations in India include:
- Fuel cost is a major portion of the operational expenses: Around 30% to 34% of telecom tower operational expenditure involves the fuel cost. Due to the risky power scenario, ~25% to 30% of the telecom towers face load shedding for more than 12 hours per day. An estimated 35% to 40% of the power requirement for the tower is mostly fulfilled by diesel than grid.
- Use of DG and diesel pilferage: Cost of power using DG (including subsidy) is 80% to 120% more than electricity. Diesel pilferage losses at ~12% to 15% also increases the overall energy costs further.
- Higher dependency on diesel: It is estimated that telecom towers alone consume up to ~1bn litres of diesel per year. The telecom industry is a significant consumer of diesel in India similar to Indian Railways and Indian Army.
- Higher carbon emission and regulatory guidelines: Towers have a significant carbon footprint. Diesel consumption from telecom towers accounts for ~ 2.5 to 3mn tons of carbon dioxide per year, which is 1.5% to 2% of total greenhouse gas emissions from India. Questions have been raised by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to control emission; it is also contemplating carbon emission reduction targets for the mobile network over the years, to be met by operators.
- Unpredictable generation of renewable energy for hybrid towers: As a reform, many tower operators have started using renewable energy like solar, wind, and biofuel to hybridise their towers. TRAI proposed to power telecom tower through renewable energy through green telecom initiative. But the unpredictable generation of renewable energy is not giving enough benefits to the operator/towercos. Considering these factors, energy storage integration with the telecom tower is a better prospect for the sustainable future. Energy storage application can provide 20% to 25% of annual savings in current fuel cost to the operators/towercos. Different technologies such as advanced lead acid, lithium-ion, zinc bromide can be suitable for this purpose. In some case, flywheel storage system can also be integrated with the large capacity tower.
TowerXchange: Lastly, what are some of the opportunities for MNOs and towercos?
Debi Prasad Dash, Director of India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA):
Towercos in India have also been adopting renewable energy like solar, wind and biofuel for their towers, following TRAI’s suggestion to telecom operators to aim at carbon emission reduction targets of 12% by 2016-17 and 17% by 2018-19.
India is actively working on electric vehicles adoption and telecom towers near the highways can play a role as charging stations. This needs to be evaluated and studied.
The most significant recent developments in wireless communication include BWA technologies such as WiMAX and LTE. Companies like Airtel, Vodafone, BSNL and Reliance Jio launched 4G services for the Indian market. IoT is the concept of electronically interconnected and integrated machines, which can help in gathering and sharing data. The Indian Government is planning to develop 100 smart city projects, where IoT would play a vital role in development of those cities.
Vodafone and Idea, India’s second and third largest operators have decided to merge. The merger will result in a customer base of 400mn (nearly 35% market share) and is expected to finalise in 2018. Airtel’s acquisition of Tata Teleservices’ mobile business was given approval in November 2017.
In March 2017, the government set a target of achieving 25bn digital transactions for banks with the help of PoS machines, transactions enabled and merchants, which have been added in firms. Digital transactions reached an all-time high of 1.11bn in January 2018 with mobile banking transactions reaching 102.6mn.
Partnerships for towercos / new revenue streams
A rough estimate on the volume of existing deployed distributed energy storage in India is approximately 4.5 GW to 6.0 GW with a current tower population of 500,000+ and an average 300Ah battery per site @ 48V.
If just 25% of this distributed energy storage could be channelised to the grid using smart controllers, it could open up new considerable revenue streams for towercos.
And as mentioned earlier, the highway tower site conversions into electric vehicle charging point can help boost the revenues of the towercos and also help India in achieving its zero emission mission 2030 for using 100% electric vehicles.
