Designing a hybrid renewable energy source system to feed the wireless access network

Abstract

Today, our society mainly relies on the energy generated by burning fossil fuels, which provides a reliable supply at an affordable price. However, this energy is not renewable and will eventually be depleted in the future. To address sustainability issues, we need to take action in all layers of our society, including our wireless access networks, which are still large power consumers. A possible solution in this field is the integration of RESs (Renewable Energy Sources) for the network supply. Nevertheless, since the production of these RESs is characterized by randomness, which is strictly dependent on the weather conditions, the network service may be compromised because of lack of energy for its supply. In this paper, we investigate the network’s power performance i.e., how much power should be bought from the traditional electricity grid, when using either solar, wind, and geothermal energy or a combination of these three to feed the network (this is here called a multiple RES system). Furthermore, we propose a novel algorithm optimizing the (multiple) RES system accounting for the related CAPEX (Capital Expenditures) and OPEX (Operational Expenditures) costs. Our study shows that geothermal energy is the most reliable one, but also extremely expensive to invest in. Wind energy is the most appropriate choice – even for summer – since it is a rather cheap RES to invest in. The optimized multiple RES system performs the best as only between 0.4% and 11% (depending on the season) of the power required by the network should be bought from the traditional electricity grid.