Solar

Solar cells arranged in photovoltaic modules transform the sun’s rays into electricity and provide a viable energy source in areas where direct sunlight is ample throughout most of the year.

Solar is an effective technology that will outlast most communications’ subsystems. It is an increasingly attractive complementary energy source for a telecoms site as the base price of solar systems has significantly reduced over the last 18 months.

However, solar requires substantial space to generate enough energy to be a significant option for most telecom installations. Therefore the amount of solar to power a telecom site on its own would be significant in terms of cost and space required.

PowerOasis has used solar in hybrid power applications resulting in an attractive fit within the TCO model. In lower power applications such as repeater or transmission sites, a solar battery solution may be used.  PowerOasis provides a comprehensive site modelling process to forecast and optimise the contribution of solar within the total power budget.

 

Wind

Wind has been used as a renewable energy source, with sub 10KW turbines being used in telecom applications. The question of wind’s viability comes down to quantity and quality – is the region a good location for wind turbine deployment? PowerOasis provides sophisticated modelling and forecasting methods to identify sites which will benefit from wind.

PowerOasis has evaluated a wide range of small turbines from different manufactures and based on those evaluations has deployed multiple sites using turbines in the range of 1KW to 5KW.

On consistently windy sites (average wind speeds 6-10ms) wind turbines can generate a significant proportion of the energy needed to run the sites with a cost per kW/h less than solar. In PowerOasis’s experience in larger deployments typically only 10- 20% of sites may have wind conditions to justify deploying a turbine. It may be advisable to deploy a low cost anemometer on candidate sites to determine exact wind conditions before deploying a turbine. The PowerOasis hybrid power systems is designed to make it very easy to add a turbine at a later date (plug and play)

In selecting a turbine the following should be borne in mind:

• We are not looking for the best performance, but the most reliable
• DC systems are not generally well understood or tested by WT manufacturers
• A separate mast for the WT add considerable cost and complexity