Quantifying Potential of Hybrid PV/WT Power Supplies for Off-Grid LTE Base Station

Abstract

Owing to the tremendous growth of cellular networks expansion, total energy consumption and operational expenditures (OPEX) has increased concurrently. To meet this challenges, a step towards to green communication has received a deep attention in the context of Long-Term Evolution (LTE). Consequently, telecommunication sectors are trending to harvest energy from renewable sources and devising off-grid hybrid base stations (BSs). The aim of this paper is to present a low cost, sustainable and eco-friendly hybrid solar photovoltaic (PV)/ wind turbine generator (WT) powered base stations (BSs) in remote areas of Bangladesh. HOMER software is used to assess the optimal system architecture and its associated net present cost (NPC) throughout this paper. For benchmarking, the economic and environmental issues of the proposed system are compared with the conventional only diesel generator (DG), and hybrid PV/DG powered BSs. Simulation results show that implementing the proposed hybrid PV/WT system to the off-grid macro BSs in remote areas can be substantially achieved 53 % and 10 % NPC saving over the aforementioned only DG powered BS and PV/DG enabled BS respectively. In addition, the proposed hybrid model exhibits zero carbon footprints compared to other schemes.