Bharti Airtel, an international telecommunications company, has announced a deal with Ericsson, a leading provider of mobile telecommunications equipment, to use Flexenclosure’s green energy solution called E-site for upgrading an initial lot of 250 mobile phone base stations powered by diesel in Nigeria.

The contract enables Ericsson to be responsible for implementation and maintenance services for all the sites. “The new green and highly cost efficient base station solution makes not only environmental sense, but also financial sense for our customers, enabling the efficient deployment of services to previously unserved or under-served areas,” Ericsson Head of Sub-Saharan Africa Region Lars Linden said.

Airtel has successfully tested the solution in Kenya and has experienced significant reduction in diesel usage and CO2 emissions against a round-the-clock diesel powered site. The company also believes that the ‘green’ mobile initiative will improve operations and minimize base stations’ environmental impact.

Flexenclosure is a Swedish start-up that develops innovative solutions for energy-efficient mobile phone coverage in developing nations.  The advanced control system of the E-site solution assures the storage of optimal power from the alternative energy sources (solar or wind) and the process is efficiently managed through the utilization of its battery bank.

The company estimates that there are 40,000 mobile phone base stations in Africa, and most of those rely on a diesel engine for power. Each base station takes anything up to 5200 gallons of the increasingly expensive hydrocarbon soup each year to ensure that people will be able to use their mobile phones. That’s around 210,000,000 gallons of diesel every single year, which isn’t good for the environment or the profit margins of the mobile providers. The technology has the potential to lower diesel usage by up to 80% – that’s a saving of 169,000,000 gallons of diesel each year for African telecommunication companies and that’s the byproducts of burning 169 million gallons of diesel that won’t be entering our atmosphere.