Telecom operators in Africa are under growing pressure to power expanding networks in tough environments; where unreliable grids, soaring fuel costs, and carbon targets collide.
CREI’s energy-as-a-service model, born from its sister company’s 17-year operational legacy, is stepping in to provide a scalable solution. We spoke to Oleg Kaplanian about how CREI’s Telecom ESCO (TESCO) approach is enabling mobile operators to shift energy risks off their books while gaining resilience, efficiency, and long-term savings.
Oleg Kaplanian is the Corporate Development Officer at CREI, where he leads the company’s business development and strategic client engagement across Africa, the Middle East, and broader Asia. His role focuses on identifying and structuring impactful opportunities in emerging markets to drive CREI’s growth in delivering sustainable telecom and power infrastructure.
TowerXchange: For those who may not be familiar, please could you tell introduce CREI, the role you play in the African telecoms sector, and your current ESCO footprint on the continent?
Oleg Kaplanian, Corporate Development Officer, CREI:
CREI is a leading infrastructure solutions provider focused on acquiring and operating power and telecom infrastructure across Sub-Saharan Africa. We were established in 2018 under our parent entity 233 Group, of which our sister company ieng is also a subsidiary.
Our work is rooted in the belief that sustainable telecom and power infrastructure is essential for long term development. We design our operations to reduce carbon emissions, expand access to reliable energy and connectivity, create local employment opportunities, and strengthen governance in emerging markets.
CREI delivers long-term, fully managed services through two main models: Telecom ESCOs (TESCOs) and Rural Build-to-Suit Solutions.
Under the TESCO model, we currently operate around 3,500 sites and are present in Nigeria, South Sudan, Mali and Central African Republic, providing sustainable power solutions to leading mobile network operators such as Orange and MTN.
We also operate rural build-to-suit and Network as a Service (NaaS) solution, deploying and operating telecom towers.
TowerXchange: The burgeoning energy service market in Africa has led to a number of ESCO players active on the continent. How does CREI differentiate itself from other companies in this space?
Oleg Kaplanian, Corporate Development Officer, CREI:
CREI stands out thanks to the operational legacy of its sister company, ieng, which has over 17 years of experience in telecom infrastructure and managed services.
It has been quite typical to see financial players set up tower and energy infrastructure operators, who then often hire the services of managed service companies to run the ground operations. While some succeed, many do not, as they lack that engineering DNA.
We have seen our customers struggle with getting the upgrades, installations, and key energy objectives met by more financed focused players, where the financial element was the core, rather than the operating element. This is what led CREI to enter the ESCO space in the first place; seeing a wave of demand from mobile operators looking for their managed services and operations partners to expand into full ESCO management.
When CREI was established in 2018, it was done on the shoulders of ieng, which to-date has deployed over 7,000 sites and currently manages over 32,000 sites. Unlike firms that approach ESCOs purely from a financial angle, CREI combines infrastructure investment with operational depth stemming from its track record and presence in over 20 countries across Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
TowerXchange: There is still a lack of clarity around what exactly defines ESCO. Can you explain the difference between full turnkey ESCO services compared to managed services and energy financing, and what this means for customers?
Oleg Kaplanian, Corporate Development Officer, CREI:
There is a lot of confusion around the term “ESCO”, which generally refers to energy service companies, but the definition varies widely in telecoms. At CREI, we deliver full power-as-a-service solutions under long-term (10+ year) contracts. This means we assume complete responsibility for powering telecom sites—including financing, engineering, procurement, installation, O&M, and even security.
This is what the main Telecom ESCO players provide; a specific offer of full power and management under an OPEX model, handling all aspects of operations across the entire project lifecycle.
Clients thus outsource their entire power scope to CREI and pay a stable monthly opex fee tied to performance metrics. Our contracts also anticipate future power needs, covering new site rollouts and capacity upgrades—without requiring any capital from the client.
TowerXchange: Mobile operators in Africa face continued pressure to tackle the ‘trilemma’ of energy; access to clean, reliable, and cost-effective power. Is it possible to deliver on all three simultaneously, and what do ESCOs bring to the table?
Oleg Kaplanian, Corporate Development Officer, CREI:
CREI’s TESCO solution does exactly that. In fact, the main key to success for our TESCO projects lies in getting the most out of renewable energy power infrastructure by investing heavily in solar, batteries, and Remote Monitoring & Management Systems (RMMS).
As a result, we have so far delivered average network power availabilities higher than 99.99%, and reduced fuel dependency fuel consumption by over 70% while supporting MNOs' net-zero emissions goals. Equally as important, we have managed to deliver up to 15% in TCO savings as of month 3 or 4 of contract signature while absorbing financing costs and ancillary asset-related costs such as insurance and asset management costs.
I mentioned earlier that ESCOs can deliver a more flexible and focused approach to energy management than conventional towercos. However, we are very much complementary to towercos: after all, the ESCO model grew largely out of the need from towercos to find partners who can manage energy for their customers.
By managing the power infrastructure, ESCOs can help towercos and mobile network operators offload a challenging part of their business and allow them to focus their capital on telecom infrastructure. Fundamentally, our clients can do what we do, but we do have specialized expertise and financial partners to back us up.
TowerXchange: How are you leveraging energy hardware and software solutions to optimise performance, efficiency and cost on your sites?
Oleg Kaplanian, Corporate Development Officer, CREI:
Remote monitoring and management go without saying. All Telecom ESCOs have their own intelligent systems in place; this is critical for operations, efficiency and cost. We can reduce site visits and travel times, gather and process much greater volumes of data for optimisation, and such data is critical for our customers’ financial and carbon reporting.
All this rich data can also be enhanced with AI to unlock whole new opportunities. Predictive maintenance, which includes both AI and IoT, is expensive but adds cost savings and network reliability benefits to prevent downtime, which is what our customers want. In future, data will only become more important to enhance network inefficiencies.
This also makes Telecom ESCOs stand out: we are adaptable and focused on our energy systems. If there are new technologies, requests to adopt new solution, or rapidly changing market conditions, we can quickly and easily adapt to this. Because if this, we are constantly on the lookout for new innovations we can integrate into our systems.
The key success to the TESCO model is solarization; it is always the goal to solarize as much as possible, up until the point it becomes uneconomical to do so. One of Africa’s biggest energy challenges comes from fuel sourcing and management. Generator costs, fuel shortages and even grid prices can be a massive headache. Maximizing the generation of power through on-site solar installation is by far the most effective solution.
So why doesn’t everyone do this? This is because the upfront CAPEX to deliver this installation is enormous. But when we look at this over a 10- or 15-year period, we see that the long-term savings gained from reducing reliance on fuel makes this initial investment well worth it.
This works well for the mobile operators because it’s not just about saving costs but also reducing emissions and enhancing reliability. Solarization improves site resiliency as fuel shortages or transportation issues have less effect on uptime, while also reducing emissions, which is an important energy KPI for an operator.
TowerXchange: The ESCO model requires continuous access to capital to drive deployment of energy infrastructure. Can you talk about your funding sources and how you can continue to scale with your customers' growing needs and increasing energy loads?
Oleg Kaplanian, Corporate Development Officer, CREI:
Our scale is made possible through the trust and long-term backing of sustainability-focused investors, including Cygnum, FinnFund, Mirova, IFC, DEG, BlueOrchard, and BluePeak. These partners share our vision and have helped structure our projects to meet compliance, ESG, and performance standards. Our deep relationships with the DFIs have also helped establish governance as an integral part of our business and operations.
As for the second part of your question, our TESCO contracts are designed to absorb both initial infrastructure costs and evolving site demands over time; whether that’s powering new builds, increasing loads on site, or upgrading aging systems. We offer clients extensive and flexible pricing menus tied to load profiles and growth projections. To ensure we’re always investment-ready, we work with our investors on 10 to 15-year forward-looking plans that include both expansion and contingency capital buffers.
When starting a project, we work with the mobile operator to do a thorough analysis of their expected energy loads over the contract period. All the operators have a plan to increase power consumption; traffic is accelerating faster than efficiency improvements can counteract this.
This is what makes access to capital a critical success factor for any ESCO, as you must be able to continue expanding in line with your customers’ energy load increase. It’s often a contractual clause, to ensure the ESCO has the funds needed for the entire project roadmap.
Being a Telecom ESCO is not just about maintaining energy equipment in line with what an operator needs now, but making sure the network remains resilient over the whole contract period. You need to consider equipment, lifecycle, longevity, security, IT systems; it is all offloaded from the client, going back to my point about why our engineering and operational DNA is so critical to our success.
TowerXchange: How do you see CREIs expansion opportunities over the next 5 years, and how does the ESCO conversation need to evolve in the telco space to drive the industry forward?
Oleg Kaplanian, Corporate Development Officer, CREI:
Over the next five years, we aim to lead the standardization of the TESCO model across Africa and Asia, where demand for scalable, efficient infrastructure continues to grow.
The TESCO model is a game of scale. Once a mobile operator sees the success of the model in one case, it becomes easy to expand this partnership further. This then compounds the returns, as we can mitigate network costs through our centralised NOC and monitoring system, driving economies of scale. This is what is happening right now with our customers; when they see the model work, it becomes a discussion of replicating this in other markets.
Mobile operators want to focus on what they do best; provide telecom and connectivity services to their customers. This is where revenue is generated, and value created. Offloading passive operations like tower and energy management allows them to focus their capital on revenue-generating areas, while reducing costs and improving efficiencies.
The recent macro climate in Africa is also helping to drive demand for ESCO services. When grid and fuel prices drastically increased over COVID, mobile operators realised that energy would become an increasingly difficult operating challenge, which cemented the need for a clearer energy strategy.
Many African utility grids are also in decline, and with growing pressure to hit emissions targets and increasing energy loads on sites due to growing data traffic, an ESCO partner who can deliver that trilemma of cost, resiliency, and sustainability is more important than ever.
We also see strong potential in our ESCO wB2S model, which combines power-as-a-service with Build-to-Suit tower development, delivering a seamless power-focused infrastructure rural solution for mobile operators.
Beyond telecom, we’ve recently launched solar home systems and Commercial & Industrial (C&I) solar solutions, targeting a range of customers and offering them long-term opex-based models. These systems not only boost power availability but also deliver guaranteed savings as early as month two.
