Solar Powered Base Station Trial in Singapore

Singapore's StarHub has announced the trial deployment of Singapore's first solar-powered mobile base station located on the roof of StarHub's head office. Currently, the base station is used to service StarHub mobile users within the head office itself although there are plans to expand the mobile coverage to the neighbourhood as well.

Mr Peter Cook, vice president of StarHub's Integrated Network Engineering said "We are taking a serious look at how our operations could impact the environment; and reducing our overall energy consumption is one of the key goals we have to help transform StarHub into a greener organisation. Right now, we are using this trial deployment as a feasibility study on how much we can offload the need for utility power and rely on cleaner energy resources. We are also looking at whether the same technology can be utilised at our other BTS located around Singapore."

The new BTS system is equipped with 20 solar panels, which means that it will operate using solar energy and rely less on utility power during the day. Based on average call loads on the BTS, approximately 58% of the BTS power consumption is driven by the solar panels. As far as it can be ascertained, if the current energy savings are maintained for the whole year, the CO2 reduction from the operation of the BTS would be about 2.5 tonnes.

The solar energy generated for the BTS runs parallel to StarHub Green's utility power grid, so that on cloudy or rainy days, or at night, the BTS will revert back to using energy from the grid.

Posted to the site on 6th August 2009