The GSM Association announced a new initiative to help mobile operators go green. Called the Green Power for Mobile Initiative, this project will help the industry use renewable energy sources to power mobile base stations. The GSMA represents more than 750 GSM mobile operators in 218 countries.

By 2012, the GSMA's goal is to power 118,000 new and existing mobile base stations with solar, wind, biofuels and other renewable energy sources. These base stations are located primarily in developing countries — usually in rural areas that have minimal access to the electrical grid. Currently, these rural base stations are usually powered with generators that run on diesel fuel.

The GSMA conducted a comprehensive study and found that, worldwide, only 1,500 base stations are powered by renewable energy. If the GSMA can reach its goal, the initiative will save up to 2.5 billion liters of diesel fuel each year. It will also cut carbon emissions for those stations by as much as 6.3 million tons.

The Association will face a few challenges, including a variety of reasons that mobile operators have been reluctant to adopt renewable-energy technologies. One of the biggest is a lack of expertise in using renewable energy to power base stations. The equipment is also expensive, and can be difficult to transport to remote stations. But as fuel prices rise, the GSMA is sure that more mobile operators will find that renewable energy is the way to go. At current fuel prices, the GSMA estimates that operators who make the switch could recoup their costs in as little as 24 months.

The GSMA has already started exploring renewable options for base-station projects. Several have been successful, such as a Digicel project to power 17 new base stations on the island of Vanuatu with wind and solar energy and an Ericsson project to use waste cooking oil to power more than 350 base stations in India.

"As oil becomes more scarce and expensive, renewable energy will be used more and more to power telecommunications networks anywhere that grid power is not available," said John Delves, CEO of Digicel Vanuatu in a press release. "Using alternative power solutions, such as harnessing wind and solar energy, will help lower our operational expenditure and reduce our environmental impact, giving people in the more remote islands of Vanuatu access to communications for the first time."

Image — GSMA