Solar-Powered Base Transceiver Station

Abstract

The electrification ratio in Indonesia has not yet achieved 100%, meaning there are still many areas without electricity access. As a key driven country development, electricity has a significant impact to the growth of telecommunication industries. In such situations, it is therefore difficult to guarantee the reliability of the telecommunication network, in particular, the electricity supply for the base transceiver station (BTS). To overcome this shortage, locally available renewable energy sources can be a solution as a power supply for a BTS. This study proposes the use of the integrated photovoltaic (PV) system as a power sources for BTS in the remote and isolated areas where the electricity from the grid is unavailable. The results show that the use of PV system is capable of supplying the electrical load requirement of BTS and is very feasible in financial analysis. The designed PV system output can produce 1.16 kW, while BTS load is 1.15 kW. We found that the integrated PV system is capable of handling BTS load. In economic perspective, the investment cost to deploy PV system is affordable due to the advantage of PV system, which is easy to maintain and operate.