Today, GPM is releasing the ninth Green Power for Mobile Bi-annual Report. This report looks at the Programme’s progress throughout the year, and highlights some of the market and trend analysis that was completed.
Jointly with our partner, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the GPM team has hosted six industry Working Groups and published twelve reports and cases studies to aid the industry. Over the past few years, there has been great progress in the number of deployed renewable energy sites – GPM has seen the number of deployed sites grow from 10,233 in 2011 to more than 37,000 at the end of 2013. More details on the growth of renewable energy sites is available in Chapter 1 of this Report.
This report also provides insight into a couple of the main challenges of deploying renewable energy sites, namely: cost, operations and the maintenance of the sites. An important factor in deployment of renewable energy systems over the years has been the cost and total cost of ownership (TCO). In Chapter 5, GPM looks at the pricing trends of green power systems, especially solar and wind, to provide an understanding of how pricing dynamics have impacted CAPEX requirements of deployment.
Also, in this issue we hear from some of the industry players such as Telekom Networks Malawi and TowerXChange in collaboration with Eaton Towers. Eaton Towers and TNM, representing tower companies and mobile network operators respectively, both give their insights on how their organisations approach green power and energy efficiency.
This report also recaps the findings from our Afghanistan and Pakistan report – two markets that have shown a great deal of potential for renewable energy for telecom sites – as well as the best practices of deployment in Africa and Asia.
The last section looks at the Mobile Enabled Community Services programme, focusing on how mobile communications can be applied to providing improved energy and water access. You will find a synopsis of the report, Sizing the Opportunity of Mobile to Support Energy and Water Access, that was released in December 2103, as well as insights on the MECS opportunity in Latin America and the challenges around financing the sector’s projects.
We hope you will find this edition of the Bi-annual Report useful and informative. If you have any questions of comments, please get in touch.