Hydrogen to Power mobile towers? The phased deregulation of diesel prices has opened up a business opportunity for industrial gas major Linde India. The Indian arm of the Munich-headquartered Linde Group aims to replace part of the diesel required to run the nearly four lakh mobile towers in the country with hydrogen. According to Managing Director Moloy Banerjee, the company recently carried out a pilot project on six mobile towers in Bihar. “We are evaluating if the potential can be translated into a commercial reality.” KEEPING UP-TIME Theoretically, the potential is huge. A third of mobile towers in the country depend on diesel generators to keep the cellular network live. The rest, according to Linde, get power from the grid for approximately half a day, meaning they run on generators for nearly 10-12 hours to ensure 98 per cent ‘up-time’. Up-time stipulations dictate that a tower cannot remain dead for more than 30 minutes a day. And, the cost to ensure this is huge. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests the country requires nearly 20 million litres of diesel to keep all the mobile towers running every day. At Rs 55 a litre, this translates into an average daily spend of over Rs 100 crore or Rs 36,000 crore a year. Hydrogen being a cheaper alternative, tower companies ought to gain substantially by phasing out the use of diesel generator sets. There is also the widespread pilferage of diesel, estimated to be as high as 25 per cent by Srikumar Memon, Managing Director of Linde - South Asia. The equation is simple. Replacing even a small part of the diesel requirement should bring about a marked improvement in the fundamentals of Linde. MAJOR CHALLENGES But that is all about theory. In practise, Banerjee says, the company will face some major challenges. It has to ensure supply of gas to mobile towers as also train operators in running hydrogen fuelled generator sets safely. The company plans to address this problem by restricting its operations to a limited geography. Banerjee admits that another gas major tried unsuccessfully to do what Linde is attempting. But that was well before the Government freed up diesel prices. The greater the price increase, the keener the tower companies get looking for alternatives. --Source TheHindu [Kolkata]
Posted on: Sun, 18 Aug 2013 18:39:21 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015