Posted: 2006-10-12 23:57 MTN looks to green energy  Presenter: Lindsay Williams Guest(s): Karel Pienaar MTN along with GSM and Ericsson team up to use biofuel to power their wireless networks. Classic Business Day gets MTN chief technology officer Karel Pienaar on the line to find out why LINDSAY WILLIAMS: Karel, what’s biofuels power all about? KAREL PIENAAR: MTN is expanding through Africa with our mobile service. We are finding after a couple of years we are penetrating more and more into the rural areas - the big limitation for us isn’t getting the infrastructure in place, but getting power to those places. So if you want to go into the midlands of Nigeria with a base station one of the biggest headaches for us is to get power - and that’s mainly because there’s no Eskom in those environments. LINDSAY WILLIAMS: I see in Nigeria only 25% of the whole country is on a national electricity grid, so you’ve actually set up your own power network anyway… KAREL PIENAAR: Yes, I always say that MTN isn’t just a telecommunications utility, we are a power as a transport utility because of the lack of infrastructure in a lot of these countries. So for us to expand our coverage we need to do something about power, and we’re doing a lot investigation into alternate fuel sources and alternate power. One of the key things is solar power, and getting the power consumption of these base stations down, and replacing the diesel fuel we are using with biofuels. LINDSAY WILLIAMS: What are we talking about here? Is this bio-diesel, or are we talking about ethanol? KAREL PIENAAR: Bio-diesel uses plant material to source the oils, and that oil is used as a diesel to run the existing diesel generators on - so it’s putting plant material through that process. LINDSAY WILLIAMS: Will this be used just for your base stations, or will it also be extended to the rest of the community? KAREL PIENAAR: Absolutely. The community is important for sustainability, so the way the pilot is going - and the way we envisage it going forward - is at our base stations in the rural areas we work with the community. Some of these plant types can’t be eaten but produce a lot of oils - so we put in the machinery to extract the oils, and they use that to supply our generators and their own diesel equipment requirements - so we think it’s a sustainable model. LINDSAY WILLIAMS: So it helps MTN and the community. To what extent does it helping though? How much typically does a base station use in terms of power on an annual basis, what sort of cost are we talking about? KAREL PIENAAR: A normal base station runs on about 60 litres per day, and a small conversion plant can produce about 100 litres a day. We have about 2,500 base stations in Nigeria at the moment, and most of those are running off two diesel generators - so we are consuming in the order of 10-million litres of diesel fuel a month. The big cost there is the cost of getting that fuel to the site - especially if the infrastructure and road system is not great - and that’s not just Nigeria but most of the places we operate in. LINDSAY WILLIAMS: So it’s not just Nigeria - it’s going to spread throughout the rest of Africa? KAREL PIENAAR: Absolutely. That’s from Cameroon to Guinea Bissau to Benin and all those sorts of places - we have similar challenges in all of those countries. As we expand outside the cities into the more rural areas - as we try and increase the penetration rate of mobile into Africa, where at the moment we’re sitting at 13% with projections of 30% penetration rates over the next five years or so - the only way is to get your base stations out there, and you need the power to support that. mvr/met Comments Related to this transcript: Comment on this transcript... Name : Email : Comments :