Abstract
With the rapidly evolving mobile technologies, the number of cellular base stations (BSs) has significantly increased to meet the explosive demand for mobile services and applications. In turn, this has significantly increased the capital and operational expenses, due to the increased electricity prices and energy consumption. To generate electricity, power plants mainly rely on fossil fuels, which are non-renewable energy resources. As a result, CO2 emissions also increase, which adversely affect health and environment. For wireless access technologies and cellular networks, BSs are the largest power consumer, and the network energy consumption is mainly dominated by the network infrastructure, which makes the telecommunications sector liable for energy consumption as well as CO2 emissions around the globe. Alternatively, solar energy is considered as an eco-friendly and economically attractive solution, due to its cost-effectiveness and sustainability. In this paper, the potentials of photovoltaic (PV) solar power to energize cellular BSs in Kuwait are studied, with the focus on the design, implementation, and analysis of off-grid solar PV systems. Specifically, system components, such as the number of PV panels, batteries, and converters needed for the design are determined and evaluated via HOMER software, with the focus on minimizing the net present cost (NPC). A comparison between various PV, diesel generator (DG), and battery bank (BB) system configurations is also performed. Moreover, a comparison of system deployment area will be presented for different PV panels that have different output power and panel sizes, in addition to utilizing a solar tracking system. It is revealed that utilizing a hybrid system configuration (i.e., PV-DG-BB) decreases fuel consumption per year by almost 95% in comparison to the conventional DG-only based electric systems. Not only that, but utilizing a pure off-grid solar PV system (i.e., PV-BB) can significantly reduce the total NPC while completely eliminating CO2 emissions; however, at the expense of more land.
Highlights
In the last decade, there has been a tremendous growth in the cellular networks market, with the number of subscribers and demand for wireless applications and services escalating dramatically [1]
The proposed electric system design will be implemented and evaluated in hybrid optimization model for electric renewables (HOMER) Pro [43,44,45], which will simulate a viable system for the proposed system design and determine the optimal system design in terms of the net present cost (NPC)
Four electric generation system configurations will be considered, which are as follows (Note that no solar tracking system has been assumed, which represents the worst-case solar energy harvesting from a cell-site; later in this work, a dual-axis solar tracking system will be incorporated into the system design for comparative purposes): 1
Summary
There has been a tremendous growth in the cellular networks market, with the number of subscribers and demand for wireless applications and services escalating dramatically [1]. Future wireless communication systems and networks are expected to accommodate the rapid increase in the number of subscribers, data rates and real-time services, and achieve significantly better energy-efficiency and complete network coverage [2]. For wireless access technologies and cellular networks, the base stations (BSs) are the largest power consumer, accounting for about 57% of the total energy consumption [3,4,5]. The network energy consumption is mainly dominated by network infrastructure. The telecommunications sector is liable for energy consumption as well as carbon dioxide (CO2 ) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions around the globe
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