News Swedes develop eco-friendly mobile mast

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/04/07/swedes_develop_eco-friendly_mobile_mast/1

A Swedish startup has developed a mobile phone base station which runs primarily on solar and wind energy, aimed at developing nations.

 

That's a good idea, especially the software that knows when the suns going to come up.

 

solutions like this are great because they are simple to explain to businesses that are generally not willing to give up there money

spend x now and save y every year

y will pay off x in z amount of time reducing your costs greatly

if simple cost effective solutions like this are adopted by more and more companies oil prices will start to reduce greatly and hopefully mean it wont cost me £60 to fill up my damn tank...

oh yeah and the air will be better to breath as well

 

But surely something so simple as 'use solar panels instead of diesel in a country with lots of sun' would/should have been thought of a while back?

 

Yeah, they've had solar powered cell towers in africa for ages. Apparently the hard part is stopping people stealing the solar panels.

 

this plus bio-diesel = nice

 

why would it need to use the diesel engine 20% of the time?

The locations their gonna put it in should be pretty sunny, and maybe a bit windy, i don't see why it cant be solar/wind like 95% of the time or more

 

You're saying it's windy at night for 97.5% of the time?

 

no but it can charge batteries while it is windy/sunny, i wouldn't have thought you could generate enough power during the day to make it run overnight, Besides, if the generator is only run 20% of the time, not only does it need to stop and start a lot (some sort of batteries) but that's 20% of the time where there isn't light/wind

I'm just surprised that you cant store enough power in a somewhere like Africa to power it for most of the time, except for excessively long dark periods without wind

 

Every little bit helps!

I would think it will also vary by load conditions. At peak hours the system may not be able to keep up with the power demand. Still, a diesel engine running 20% of the time is better than one running 100% of the time!

 

The real hidden cost is the batteries they will half to be replaced every few years. And the more that they discharge before being allowed to recharge the faster they will run out. So while this system appears to save money there is no telling how much the hidden cost could be. To reduce battery costs it would be best that they are not discharged more than 50% ever. But that would increase initial costs. However the longer between each battery replacement the better because the technology is likely to improve over time.

 

This'll probably be economically viable in remote areas even before you make any allowances for climate change issues - transporting diesel to really out of the way places gets crazily expensive (like, £5/litre). At those prices something like this will pay for itself pretty rapidly.

 

The same people that steal the Diesel?