April 4, 2008 5:57 PM PDT

Green-tech base stations cut diesel usage by 80 percent

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Flexenclosure is trying to wean the cell phone business in Africa off of fossil fuels.

The Swedish start-up has designed a base station for mobile networks that would run on sun and wind power. It all started with a request from telecom company Ericsson three years ago. The company needed an energy source for a potential project in Africa and wanted a more environmentally friendly solution than the conventional diesel generators that usually power base stations out of reach from electricity grids.

(Credit: Flexenclosure)Right now, there are 40,000 base stations for mobile networks in Africa, most of them running on diesel. Each diesel base station consumes approximately 20,000 liters (5,283 gallons) of diesel per year. Soaring energy prices and falling prices for phone plans put mobile network operators in a difficult position. So the phone companies started looking for ways to reduce the cost of operating their base stations.

Flexenclosure's base station, called E-site, comes with a wind turbine in the network tower and solar panels on the roof. The renewable energy sources charge a battery that can then power the base station during the night. As a complement, it has a small diesel generator. E-site runs on an intelligent operating system, which learns and adapts to the local conditions.

"If the battery tension is low, but the system knows from experience that the sun will be rising soon, it won't use the diesel generator," says Stefan Jern, CEO of Flexenclosure in an interview. Hence, the E-site will use the best available energy source. This will reduce the use of diesel by up to 80 percent, according to Flexenclosure. …

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