Telecom Secretary Proposes Joint Task Force with MNRE to Push Green Tech in the Sector

Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan has proposed setting up a joint task force with the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) to promote green technology in the sector. 

“It is critical that we should set up a joint task force between the two ministries (Telecom and MNRE) to ensure that we work on this together. The incentives that are given to promote renewable energy, the telecom sector should become primary recipient of that kind of incentives,” Sundararajan said at an event of telecom tower industry body, Tower and Infrastructure Providers Association (TAIPA0).

She said that within the mandate of MNRE, there will be scope to design attractive incentivisation policy that can be channelised to telecom companies who adopt renewable energy.

“In the new policy, we have already made provision to promote green telecom,” Sundararajan said. TAIPA Director General Tilak Raj Dua said the telecom sector in the country has already deployed around 1.15 lakh diesel-free sites by using alternative energy sources, such as lithium-ion batteries and VRLA batteries.

Currently, the energy storage solutions contribute up to 5-gigawatt hours (GWh) towards power consumption by the telecom sector and are expected to grow up to 25 GWh by 2022, according to TAIPA estimates.

TRAI Chairman R S Sharma said with 5G services coming, telecom infrastructure especially base stations will have to be quadrupled and green technology can help industry save the cost of operations.

He said rewards associated with the adoption of renewable energy are enough to drive its adoption in the sector rather than any strict regulatory measures.

Recently, in an interview with Saurenergy, Santhosh S Nair, Director, Energy Segment-Asia, Nokia spoke about the massive potential in the energy segment in India for Nokia and the Telecom industry.

“When we all talk about industry 4.0, we are talking about IOT (Internet of Things) and analytics-driven efficiencies applied in industries, and the energy industry is one where relevance and influx of IoTs are high.”

“Every part of the energy network needs to be sensed. There are a lot of grid edge systems and devices being added to the utility network eg Renewables, Storage, EVs, smart meters, asset sensors. This necessitates edge computing and real-time communication and response capabilities coming. With the rise of renewables energy sources which are often highly distributed energy sources and often in remote areas. These assets need to be connected. That’s where Nokia is positioning itself to help build a reliable, secure and resilient smart grid. And we see that there’s a real scope of energy sector which need more secure, with more reliable networks coming with LTE, that kind of speed and response to any problems in the network,” he said.