Abstract
Telecommunication towers for cell phone services
contain Base Transceiver Stations (BTS). As the BTS systems
require an uninterrupted supply of power, owing to their
operational criticality, the demand for alternate power sources has
increased in regions with unreliable and intermittent utility power.
For the BTS that lie in the regions where power outages are
unwarranted, alternate power sources need to be deployed to keep
the BTS sites energized. To cater to this growing need, an
optimization framework has been developed which optimizes the
operational costs of various BTS power system configurations. In
this paper, we present three such alternate frameworks for power
supply to the BTS in case of a power failure; to supply
uninterrupted and continuous power to the sites. In particular, our
optimization framework consists of three power system
configurations; utility grid with battery backup (configuration 1),
utility grid with battery backup and diesel generator
(configuration 2), and utility grid with battery backup and solar
(configuration 3). These three configurations are then evaluated
based on linear optimization by incorporating various system
constraints. Upon the application of these configurations in a case
study, the results demonstrated that configuration 2 can provide
reliable power for up to 8 hours of grid outage per day and
provides the best reliability amongst other configurations. But the
downside of configuration 2 is its cost. Configuration 3 is
economically viable and cost-effective but less reliable power
system configuration due to the limited availability of solar PV
power. The utility of configuration 3 may be an issue with large
blackouts in cases of limited solar capacity. For our particular
power source specifications and capacity (including battery
specifications, load demand, diesel generator and Solar PV
capacity) the findings suggested that for an eight-hour power
outage, configuration 2 lumps up energy cost to $12.86 per day
compared to the more economically viable configuration 1 and
configuration 3, which costs up to $12.44 and $10.56 respectively.