Dung and other "traditional" fuels to power cell sites in India

VeerChand Bothra (Mobile Pundit) points to an article in India's Financial Express, Dung to power mobile technology in rural India.  I found this interesting as, on my last day at 3GSM in Barcelona, I spent a few minutes at Ericsson's display of the bio-diesel plant that is the subject of the Financial Express article.

There are other pictures (here & here) and an alternate picture in this article in Biodiesel Magazine.

What's not described in any of the coverage I've seen, is how these systems actually work.  According to the Ericsson fellow working the booth at 3GSM, the technology is already in service in several developing countries.  What's new its use to power mobile cell sites. 

Typically one biodiesel plant produces a lot more fuel than you need for a single cell site, so instead there's one plant for several dozen cell sites.  Peak production is 2500 liters of diesel every 10 hours.  In one approach, a farmer's co-op runs one of these plants and owns a (diesel-powered) tank truck.  They contract with the local mobile phone company to supply biodiesel to a group of cell sites, then deliver the fuel by truck to the various cell sites.

The point is to deal with locations where imported diesel is expensive and/or the supply is unreliable.

Comments

[Alex]

I preferred the Moto demonstration next to it - after all, biodiesel needs this plant and the institutional arrangements, and you still have to send a field-service tech around with a truckload of valuable fuel. Moto's demo included a node B, a box of batteries, solar panels, a wind turbine, and a Canopy 802.16d client for the backhaul. An entirely self-contained, zero dig, zero fuel infrastructure.

[brough]

Alex, yes, per-cell-site solutions make more sense me also.

However, the solar panels were a bit optimistic. A typical cell site can easily run over 2000 watts. The solar panel in the Moto booth was a 200 watt panel, so you'd need 10-15 of those if you had sun 24 hours per day and 25-50 of them in a more realistic situation. The wind turbine looked very good. It was rated at 2500 watts (at some wind speed which I didn't write down...).

Here are pictures of the wind turbine and solar panels in the Moto booth:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/broughturner/398198235/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/broughturner/398198247/

[Mads Friis Jensen]

I am all for alterneative power like vind and solarpower, but it is feaseble to have a power source which is weather dependent...

[brough]

Mads, Given today's battery technology, there are few places in the world where one could rely on wind or solar alone, but if augmented with diesel (bio or otherwise) solar or wind might significantly reduce the frequency of diesel deliveries.