Flexenclosure: The dawn of the green energy era

The economics of cell site energy are changing – for the better. Where the energy opex at a single cell site once had to cost upwards of US$40,000 a year, now the increased efficiency of power solutions and the falling costs of renewable energy sources offers an opportunity to reduce energy opex by 80-90%, and to cut scheduled maintenance to a single annual visit. To learn more, TowerXchange spoke to David King and Ann Louise Johansson at Flexenclosure, who specialise in green, fully integrated and optimised power  systems for cell sites – not only for the sake of the environment, but because their products prove that switching to green energy is an incredibly efficient way to cut opex.

TowerXchange: Where do Flexenclosure fit in the telecoms infrastructure ecosystem? 

Flexenclosure provides eSite, a hybrid power system for off-grid and unreliable grid cell sites that enables mobile network operators or tower companies to make radical reductions in diesel costs.  We use our patented control system Diriflex to manage a unique charging strategy designed to maximise battery life and minimise genset runtime. We’ve reduced diesel consumption by 80- 90%, while still keeping payback to less than 2 years.

TowerXchange: What has been Flexenclosure’s experience in Africa? 

We have installed around 460 sites, of which 252 are in Nigeria, 52 in Chad, 95 in Tanzania, and 14 in Ghana.

Our eSite solution has achieved good results from installations in Sudan, South Sudan, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar and Chad. We’ve installed sites in some of the harshest environments in Africa. Most of these have been upgrades to existing sites and they have included solar power. One of our biggest deployments is with Airtel Nigeria.

In addition we build and deploy eCentre, a pre-fabricated, pre-equipped, modular data centre. In 2001 in Nigeria we installed our first eCentre, and since then we have deployed more than 6,000 m2 of eCentre data centre facilities there and in other countries such as Ghana and Sudan.

TowerXchange: Do you see Flexenclosure as a pure product provider or an ESCO?

Flexenclosure is a product  company. We offer a complete system, including batteries, electronics, cabinet,  control and management systems. Further options include solar panels, cooling systems, grid manager and multi-tenant capability. We’re not an ESCO. We focus on providing solutions that manage power in the most economical way with or without renewables.  We are happy to work together with ESCOs to serve both Tower Companies and MNOs as appropriate.

TowerXchange: What’s been the balance between installing just CDC batteries, solar and wind power at the cell sites you’ve retrofitting and rolled out in Africa? 

So far almost all of our sites in Africa have included renewable power sources. MNOs in Africa have been keen to try renewable energy and most of our work has been on upgrades to solar hybrid rather than greenfield sites, where wind power might be a more viable option. The falling cost of solar panels and commoditisation of solar equipment has supported this trend. Wind power is a less mature market. We can get a lot of power out of wind, and have a 6kW wind turbine but it is currently more challenging to introduce.

eSite provides a great economic solution either with or without renewable energy. The addition of renewable power increases the cumulative savings from an eSite but also stretches the pay-back time.  So inclusion of renewables really depends on our customers’ preferences and financial time horizons.

What is important is flexibility. We take a modular approach, starting with an energy efficient system built around an intelligent controller, Diriflex, and batteries. Renewable energy sources can always be added at a later stage.

TowerXchange: How do the requirements of multi-tenant towercos compare to those of single tenant MNOs? 

One marked difference between the towercos and the MNOs is the priority and focus on site profitability.  Towercos are taking a more proactive approach to improving site economics. The other main difference is that towercos require a flexible system that can grow with the addition of tenants and cope with the additional load. It is with this in mind that we have developed our eSite k6, which can host up to four tenants. In a typical scenario, a towerco starts with a relatively low load, single to two tenant environment. The savings achieved mean that investment in the eSite is paid off in 18-24 months. As the load increases and additional tenants are added, the towercos just need to add additional batteries when required.

The eSite k6 includes a bigger cabinet with capacity to add strings of batteries and multi-tenant functionality such as metering and independent disconnection.

We have a bold vision of the African tower industry. For towercos it’s currently a land-grab of sites, but then it’s all about site profitability, and we’re pretty certain we’ve got the best product on the market to support them.

Scalability and multi-tenant handling are key to towercos. Towercos will likely start with a single tenant on a tower, which means they’re faced with high costs relative to lease income, so it’s crucial to implement an efficient and modular power solution to minimise energy opex from day one.  The investment for multi-tenant functionality, additional batteries and possibly solar components can be added in a modular fashion as additional tenants are added.

Flexenclosure’s bundles eManager, a power management and optimisation system together with eSite. eManager is used by towercos to ensure optimised performance over a whole network. eManager is not just a monitoring system, it is used as an energy data warehouse, for alarm handling, to track energy cost KPIs, to conduct detailed power analysis, to manage diesel consumption logistics, for asset management, and also to remotely monitor and trouble shoot sites. Some problems can be solved remotely but if not at least they can identify the problem and bring the right tools.

Flexenclosure provides an intelligent tool enabling towercos to control, measure and bill separately for the energy consumption of each tenant. To date, the model of towercos selling power to tenants on a kWh basis is not being widely used, but the tools are there for towercos to change their model.

For MNOs and towercos alike, Flexenclosure enables the optimisation of the network from an energy perspective. This can make a huge difference to our customers to be able to see what’s going on at their sites. If we can improve performance by an extra 10% that could be US$4,000 of opex per site. Across a portfolio of 1,000 sites that’s US$4million per year!

TowerXchange: What typical capex is required to fit Flexenclosure’s solutions and what’s the RoI? 

When we’re building business cases, we’re always looking for payback in less than two years. That can be achieved on opex savings of 80-90% based on typical opex of around US$40,000 per site per year. Based on that, you can work out what kind of capex is involved!

Renewables have reached a price point where they make sense for MNOs and towercos because the RoI payback is short enough, and the subsequent savings can add up to many US$millions over the lifetime of the equipment and over hundreds of sites.

TowerXchange: What kind of maintenance opex savings can be realised with hybrid energy? 

We enable MNOs and towercos to have maintenance costs at a fraction of current costs. From Flexenclosure’s perspective, it’s about reducing site visits and cost of maintenance. Our remote management and energy optimisation system eManager is a standard part of eSite, so as soon as you’ve commissioned and finalised a site you can log in and see what’s happening at a site from the NOC.

Refuelling visits obviously drop dramatically with DG runtime reduced by 80-90%, and due to careful design and a fully integrated system our equipment requires only a single annual maintenance visit. The business case for renewable energy has to work, so we’ve designed solutions as maintenance free as they can be.

TowerXchange: Is there a big change management challenge – do you need new skills in the maintenance team if you install renewables? 

Part of the eSite concept of a carefully designed and fully integrated system is that the solution is easy to maintain, so operators wouldn’t require specialist skilled personnel. While they don’t need new people, their people need to be trained so they understand different ways of working and running a site with energy efficient power solutions and renewables. For example, cooling is a major part of any cell site energy solution, and our system has been designed to run at quite a high temperature, but if people think it’s too hot they’ll open the door!

TowerXchange: Looking beyond the cell site at community power initiatives – what are the benefits for the telecoms industry to support rural electrification? 

Providing power will be the next revolution after the current mobile telephony revolution. Providing power to rural communities will have a similar impact in developing and changing lives.

From the telecoms industry’s point of view, Community Power projects charge mobile phone batteries, which means more minutes and data can be consumed. At one of our Community Power projects there’s a parallel project to help a village to develop sustainable business plans using the power that is now available. More productive businesses ultimately means more need for communication.

We need to dimension cell sites for additional community power in remote villages. It’s challenging to find the right business model to meet small, localised power requirements as they’re almost always more costly than larger sites. Nonetheless, African governments should see microgeneration with telecoms (or agricultural) anchor tenants as legitimate alternatives to extending power grids.

TowerXchange: Finally, how would you sum up how Flexenclosure differentiate yourselves from competitors? 

Simply eSite delivers the best sustained performance of any hybrid energy system. That is, we provide the lowest diesel and energy related costs and the best site economy over a network of sites and for a longer period of time.

In addition Flexenclosure is a great business partner. We’re small enough to be technically and financially flexible – nothing is off limits. For example, we’ll consider putting the equipment in place and sharing savings, helping towercos find capital by working with third party export credit financiers.

We achieve the greatest energy savings and the best price:performance ratio. The way we achieve this is through an integrated and optimised solution design that is modular to fit the towercos business model. We have an intelligent controller, Diriflex, network based power management and energy optimisation using eManger, and remote support and software maintenance. We deliver the most for your money, not just in the first six months but going forward.