Renewable-Energy-Powered Cellular Base-Stations in Kuwait’s Rural Areas

Abstract

Cellular network operators are actively expanding network coverage and capacity by deploying additional base-stations to provide mobile services to customers in rural areas. The increasing deployment of cellular base-stations has increased the power consumption, energy cost, and associated adverse environmental impact. This paper addresses the feasibility of using renewable energy sources to power off-grid rural 4G/5G cellular base-stations based on Kuwait’s solar irradiance and wind potentials. More importantly, a hybrid renewable energy system will be designed and modeled to meet realistic energy demands of remote base-stations and determine the optimum size of the hybrid system components. Particularly, the hybrid off-grid system may incorporate wind turbines (WTs), photovoltaic (PV) solar panels, converters, a battery bank (BB), and a back-up diesel generator (DG). Two remote cell-sites are considered, namely: (1) Jal-Alayah and (2) Wafra, where the Jal-Alayah cell-site is characterized with higher average wind speed (and wind potential), while the Wafra cell-site has higher average clearness index and solar irradiance. Various hybrid PV/wind electric system (HPWES) configurations are modeled and simulated via HOMER software, with the aim of determining the optimal configuration—in terms of net present cost (NPC)—in each cell-site. Specifically, the simulations have revealed that the WT-BB configuration is the most economical at the Jal-Alayah cell-site while requiring minimal land area and ensuring 100% renewable energy and zero CO2 emissions. This configuration is followed by the PV-DG-BB and PV-WT-DG-BB configurations, where the latter configuration incurs a marginal increase in the NPC than the former but with less land area. On the other hand, the PV-BB configuration is the most cost-effective in the Wafra cell-site; however, in the scenario of limited land area, then the PV-DG-BB configuration can be used but at the expense of slight increase in the NPC and CO2 emissions. This study confirms that utilizing renewable energy sources in two rural areas in Kuwait can be extremely effective in replacing conventional DG-powered base-stations, while minimizing the NPC and CO2 emissions.