It is home to a Vodafone Qatar GSM antenna

Karana, rare Palm Grove in the Qatar desert. To achieve this, must be rolling a straight time since Doha on a sumptuous road. We are one of the richest countries in the world per capita, the oil and especially gas. A minaret in work demonstrates the real estate frenzy of the country. But local curiosity is a 50 metre-high tower, red and white. It is home to a Vodafone Qatar GSM antenna. This Telecom base station is not like the others: it works with three different energy sources, wind, solar and fuel oil.

"A billion more people do not have access to telecommunications in the world for energy problems.". "It is not at all, either the power grid is not sufficiently reliable and powerful to install a base station", notes Frédéric Wauquiez, Alcatel-Lucent, the firm deploys the Qatar Vodafone network. Hence the interest of the OEM and its competitors for alternative energies. A year ago, the French-American Group also launched an industrial initiative named "Green Touch", whose objective is to divide the energy consumption of telecom networks per mile. Base stations are one of the components the most visible of this strategy, which also includes the data centers, routers and cables.

A new association

Alcatel-Lucent has already deployed about 400 "alternative" stations in the world since 2006, but they work primarily with a generator and the Sun. Solar and wind power association started last year. The system is genlocked to the weather forecast and distributes the efforts of intelligently between three sources of energy. "The Sun is very predictable but it is still inefficient;" "the wind is less predictable but it is more efficient," summarizes Frédéric Wauquiez. Here in the desert, the fuel provides only 10 of the energy. More solar panels will become efficient, less it will be beneficial to install a generator in countries where it rains only five days per year.

In black Africa, fossil power has already been completely eliminated in full Bush base stations. The economic calculation is fast, when you know that the Bowser must sometimes drive two weeks to deliver the fuel. But to the Qatar, it has kept generator already in place before that station became hybrid. The fuel is so cheap in the Gulf that it is difficult to deny.

According to the GSM Association, the number of stations operating with renewable energy, today included between 6,000 and 8,000, expected to more than tenfold by 2012. On that date, the 118.000 alternative stations account for 20 of facilities not connected to the grid - the remaining 80 are equipped with generators. Operators will become more green, because they will necessarily have to invest in more remote areas.

And fossil fuels are expensive. With the expansion of mobile telecommunications, the world expenditure on electricity for base stations will increase from $ 15.8 billion in 2007 to 21.9 billion in 2013, predicts ABI Research.

Then of course, the solar panels are expensive, but it takes less than three years to amortize the difference with a traditional base station. We begin to understand in emerging countries. We see even an oil emirate give lessons to the developed on alternative energy...