Optimal Design and Analysis of Integrating Solar Energy in Off-Grid Telecommunication Sites

Abstract

In the last decade, the number of mobile subscription all over the world growing at a magnificent pace and providing connectivity to everyone around the globe is indispensable, which led to an increasing number of mobile base stations (BSs). In urban community mobile operator has easy access to grid electricity and they can easily installed BTS in these locations in a cost-effective way. But the rural areas face huge problem of electricity and grid electricity is not spread out in all the region, so, mobile operator face a huge problem while deploying BTS. Most of the rural region of Pakistan facing the problem of load shedding, power failure and no grid electricity access, so, mobile operator usually employed diesel generator to cater these issues, but due to escalating price of diesel oil and global warming it’s very costly in term of energy production and is environmentally unfriendly too. So, mobile operator needs some alternative ways of energy production in these locations. To power up BTS in remote areas, renewable energy sources are the best solution and incorporation with diesel generator make the system further efficient and reliable. This study furnishes the design and simulation of stand-alone HRES along with their feasibility report and economic analysis using HOMER. Another aim of this work is the comparison of the existing system and the proposed hybrid system for the telecommunication site. A sensitivity analysis is also carried out to observe and analyze the effect of variation in different parameter on the COE and NPC. It is evident from the optimization results that the integration of solar energy along with battery bank is the most optimum. Furthermore, due to the integration of renewable energy emission of greenhouses gases get abated. Keywords— Base Transceiver Station (BTS), Net Present Cost (NPC), Cost of Energy (COE), HRES