2010 IEEE International Energy Conference

Solar-Wind Hybrid Power for Rural Indian Cell Sites

Dr Allabaksh Naikodi
Hyderabad, India
naikodi_allabaksh@yahoo.com

Abstract Rapid expansion of rural cell phone subscriber base
in India is facing some tough challenges in getting the stable
back up power for cell sites. Grid power availability is very poor
and use of diesel generator is turning out to be expensive with
heavy fuel and transportation costs. Use of alternative energy
provides a long term viable solution. Solar-wind hybrid power
generation system was installed on a typical rural Indian cell site
to demonstrate the reduction of fuel consumption by over 90%.
Practical implementation and results are presented in this paper
along with providing the grid power availability scenario in
rural India.
I. INTRODUCTION
In recent times, the Mobile Telephony has seen the fastest
growth with over 4 billion users worldwide. By end of 2009,
India had the worlds second largest subscriber base of 545
million [1]. In next two years it is expected to cross 700
million mark, mostly spreading into country side. However
the lack of stable grid power (mains or popularly known as
Electricity Board EB power) in rural India provides a
bigger challenge to this phenomenal growth. Average EB
power availability in these parts for commercial usage is less
than 7 hours a day; during remaining period Diesel
Generators (DG) provide the power. Cell site running on DG
is turning out to be expensive and non profitable due to high
fuel cost, heavy pilferages, regular maintenance and fuel
backup electrical power sources, and sheltering to store the
ground based equipments.[2].
In some countries it is also referred as Base Transceiver
Station (BTS) or just base station. The term "base station site"
might better reflect the increasing co-location of multiple
mobile operators, and therefore multiple base stations, at a
single site. Even a site hosting just a single mobile operator
may house multiple base stations, each to serve a different air
interface technology like GSM or CDMA.
Due to poor quality of grid power, typical Indian cell site
will have additional power back up units like diesel generator,
AMF panel or comprehensive static Power Management Unit
(PMU) for grid power interface. PMU has some unique
features like best phase voltage selection from the available
three phase input, provide isolation and RMS voltage
regulation using static power electronic switches (SCRs) on
secondary of multi-tapped isolation transformer. Figure-1
depicts a basic block schematic of a typical Indian cell site.
Shelter
PMU SMPS
Battery
Bank

transportation for long distances.

Use of alternative energy can reduce the operation of diesel
Alarm Microwave BTS
generators. In major parts of India good solar power is Monitoring Transreceiv Transreceiv
and WDAQ ers ers
available and in most parts sufficient wind can also be tapped.
In this paper, a practical implementation of solar-wind hybrid
Air Conditioning System
power on a typical rural Indian cell site is presented. Microwave
Antenna

II. BRIEF OVERVIEW OF A CELL SITE IN INDIA BTS Antenna

Cell site is a term primarily used for a site where antennas Grid Power
Input
Diesel
Generator
and electronic communications equipment are placed on a Transformer

radio mast or tower to create a cell in a cellular network. A Tower

cell site is composed of a tower for mounting antennas, one or

more sets of transmitter/receivers (transceivers or TRX), Figure 1. Typical Indian cell-site
signal processors, control electronics, a GPS receiver and

978-1-4244-9380-7/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE 69

 Primary source of power to these cell sites is the grid EB
power; whenever it is not available, diesel generators are
turned on. In an indoor site, major portion (around 60%) of the
power is consumed by the air conditioners to maintain the
shelter temperature below 35 deg cel as required by the BTS
electronics and control equipments. In case of outdoor BTS
this cooling power is reduced to around 30% for operating the
forced ventilation system. The regulated DC power is
consumed by BTS and Microwave equipments; a substantial
portion is also consumed for charging the large battery banks.
Over 20% of sites have EB power for less than 4 hrs and
another 25% get power for 4 to 8 hrs. Thus around half of the
sites get power for less than 8 hrs. Surprisingly, the sites
getting power for over three fourth of a day is just 15%. Thus
85% of the sites mainly run on diesel generators. If 202 sites
located in cities (district and taluka head quarters) are taken
out, then situation looks worse for rural areas. Below Table III
lists the rural sites scenario.
TABLE III. DAILY GRID POWER (EB) AVAILABILITY IN RURAL SITES

III. POWER CONSUMPTION ANALYSIS EB Available Hrs 0 to 4 5 to 8 9 to 12 13 to 16 17 to 24

A. Power consumption by AC and DC loads No of Sites 197 234 214 73 38

As referred above, major power at the Indian cell sites is % of total sites 26.06 30.95 28.31 9.75 5.07
used for providing required cooling followed by DC loads of
BTS transceivers and other control and communications
systems. Air-conditioning systems ranging from 1.5 to 3 TR Practical consumption of diesel in 60% of these rural sites
capacities consuming 1.8 to 3.6 kW of power (respectively) is over 1000 liters per month, which costs around 40 thousand
are used in the cell sites based on the number of BTS Indian Rupees. With more than 110,000 rural cell sites
equipments installed there. operational nationwide, around 4 billion Indian Rupees
(around 1 b US$) are spent on diesel every year on these sites.
TABLE I. POWER REQUIREMENT OF A CELL SITE WITH DIFFERENT
BTS CONFIGURATIONS
IV. SOLAR-WIND HYBRID POWER FOR CELL-SITES
Already solar-wind hybrid systems are tried for power
No BTS AC Other Total
of
No of AC
Load Load Loads Power generation application at a relatively larger power for grid
TRX Capacity interactive generation [3] and for off grid applications like
BTS (kW) (kW) (kW) (kW)
1 3 1.5 TR 0.76 1.80 0.48 3.04
tourism [4]. May be due to low power requirements, solar-
wind hybrids are rarely used for powering the cell sites.
2 6 2 TR 1.56 2.40 0.48 4.44
Typically solar power is available for over 250 days in
3 9 3 TR 2.34 3.60 0.48 6.32 most part of India [5]. Solar irradiation map is shown in
Figure-2 [6]. Wind power potential is mostly available in
southern and western part of the country plus all along the
One BTS can have 3 to 12 Transceivers (TRXs) along
large coastline of over 10000 km [7]. An Indian map showing
with associated control and amplification circuits, antennas
the wind velocity across the nation is given in Figure-3[8].
etc..For simplicity, least numbers of TRXs of a BTS have
been considered to find the minimum power required at the
cell site. Table I lists these details along with the power
consumed by ancillary loads for lighting etc.
Rural Indian cell site typically have one or two BTS with 3
to 6 TRXs.

B. Heavy Diesel Consumption is Rural Sites

To carry out the analysis, we have taken the practical data
of 958 cell sites from three districts of a fairly developed
southern Indian state Karnataka. They include the cities, towns
and rural villages spread across these three districts. Daily EB
available hours in these sites range from zero to 24 hrs. For
Figure 2. Solar radiation on India (source TERI)
analysis purpose it is divided in to four ranges; 0 t0 4 hrs, 5 to
8 hrs, 9 to 12 hrs, 13 to 16 hrs and > 16 hrs. Table II lists the
number of sites falling in these ranges. By effective utilizing the solar and wind power potential
the operation of diesel generator can be brought down
substantially. To demonstrate this, a rural site having two
TABLE II. DAILY GRID POWER (EB) AVAILABILITY
outdoor BTS loads with peak power requirement of around 2.8
EB Available Hrs 0 to 4 5 to 8 9 to 12 13 to 16 17 to 24 kW is selected. It is located at 16.659388 latitude and
76.051861 longitudes with sufficient solar and wind power
No of Sites 197 241 232 137 151
potential. Average EB available at this site is for less than 3
% of total sites 20.56 25.16 24.22 14.30 15.76 hrs a day and monthly diesel consumption by the 15 kVA
diesel generator is over 1062 liters.

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 Figure 3. Wind speed map of India (source IREDA)

Solar PV panels of 4.05 kW and a vertical wind turbine of

3 kW was installed at this site; block schematic of this solar-
wind hybrid integrated power system is shown in Figure-4.
BTS and
Grid (EB) Power AMF Panel/Power Other Loads
SMPS / Battery Figure 5. Structure of PV panels
Management Unit
Charger
(PMU)
From Diesel The common controller charges a 600 AH battery
Generator Main Battery specifically used to store solar and wind energy with an
Bank
autonomy of over 14 hrs (referred as AE battery bank in
From Wind Figure 4). Load controller isolates this AE battery bank from
Power Generator the main battery bank of 400 AH which feeds power to the
Wind Power Intelligent Load
Controller Controller
load. Whenever the AE battery bank is charged with sufficient
power from either solar or wind powers, the load controller
connects it to the main battery bank. Thus both batteries now
From Solar AE Battery
PV Panels Bank
become parallel and are charged by the same charge controller
Solar Charge
Controller
and together supply the load current. Whenever the battery
bank voltage falls below a defined level indicating that the
power from solar and wind is insufficient for the load, the load
Figure 4. Block diagram of the integrated solar-wind hybrid power with controller initiates the process to take the power either from
EB and DG EB or diesel generator and isolate the AE battery from Main
Battery by opening the circuit between them. The picture of
18 PV panels of 225 Wp are used to get a total power of solar and wind control panels along with AE battery bank is
4.05kWp. They are connected in series-parallel matrix to get depicted in Figure 6 and pictorial view of the solar-wind
90V and 48 Amp maximum voltage (Vmpp) and current power integrated site is shown in Figure7.
(Impp) respectively. Basic specifications of the PV panel are
listed in Table IV and a wired structure of 6 PV panels is
shown in Figure 5.

TABLE IV. PV PANEL SPECIFICATIONS

PV Module Specification and System Details

Maximum Power of Module (Pmax) 225 W
Voltage at Max Power (Vmpp) 31.00 V
Current at Max Power (Impp) 7.26 A
Open Circuit Voltage (Voc) 36.00 V
Short Circuit Current (Isc) 7.95 A
Tolerance 3%
No of Modules used 18 Nos
Total System Power 4050 W
System Voltage (3 Module in series) 90 V
Figure 6. Panels of solar and wind controls along with AE battery ban
System Current (6parallel X3 series) 48A

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 TABLE V. PRACTICAL DATA OF DIESEL CONSUMED BEFORE AND AFTER
AE POWER INSTALLATION

DG Run Diesel Diesel Monthly

Months
Hrs Consumed Charges Charges
Before AE Installation
Dec09 -
2,718 5,436 217,400 43,480
Apr'10
After AE Installation
May10 -
175 350 14000 2,800
Sep'10

Results from this proto site demonstrate that, by using

solar-wind hybrid power, the diesel consumption at rural
Indian cell sites can be drastically reduced by over 90%. With
highly attractive government subsidies and incentives, it is
economically viable too, plus it helps in reducing the pollution
and keeping the rural India green.

Figure 7. Picotrial view of a solar-wind powered cell site
To capture the live data from this cell-site a GPRS based
wireless data device is installed, which collects the
information like DG run hours, EB available hours, site on
battery hours etc. The fetched data is communicated to a
centralized server. Web access is also provided to view this
live data. Typical screen shot of the front screen is depicted in
Figure 8. It provides details of the site (name, location, ID no),
time of the latest data packet received, daily, weekly and
cumulative (from date of AE installation) run hrs of AE, DG,
EB and site on battery.
Figure 8. Default screen shot of the live data from solar-wind cell site
accessed through web
To analyze the diesel savings on account of AE
installation, practical data of diesel consumption for a period
of five months before the AE installation and for the same
period after AE is installed are tabulated in Table V.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We sincerely thank the management of BS Transcomm
Ltd, Hyderabad, for generously funding the Alternative
Energy initiatives and providing us an opportunity to work on
this project. We also remain grateful to their field (operations
and maintenance) team for extending support during project
execution.
REFERENCES
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[2] ^ International Engineering Consortium On-line Education, "Cellular
Communications" undated, URL retrieved 14 August 2007.G.
[3] T A Williams, Characterization of alternative hybrid power tower
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[5] R K Puchouri, From Sunlight to Electricity Apractical handbook on
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[6] Shirish Garud, Fellow and Ishan Purohit, Making solar thermal power
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[7] Allabaksh Naikodi and G Sridhar Rao, Electricity From Sea Waves A
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[8] http://www.cwet.tn.nic.in/Docu/FINALWPDMAP.pdf

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