The Sustainable Energy Europe (SEE) campaign is an initiative of the European Commission managed by the Executive Agency for Competitiveness and Innovation (EACI), under the authority of Commissioner for Energy Günther H. Oettinger. The winners of the annual competition were announced at an awards ceremony in Brussels on 23 March as part of the European Union’s Sustainable Energy Week.
Alcatel-Lucent entry outlined its program to develop and build wireless telecommunications base stations powered with alternative energies, such as solar, wind and fuel cells. This program, announced in February 2009, is designed to enable communications service providers to extend the reach of their wireless services to areas not served by an electrical grid, making it possible to provide telephone and broadband communications services to the more than one billion people who are still cut off from this vital tool for economic and social development.
The program will also make it possible for service providers in developed regions to retrofit their wireless base stations so that they can take advantage of advances in alternative energy technology.
The program is developing the first truly industrial solution ready for large deployments so that it would be possible to address a market estimated at more than 100,000 mobile base stations that could be powered with alternative energy solutions between 2010 and 2012, representing a yearly savings of about 7 million tons of CO2.
The program includes the Alcatel-Lucent Alternative Energy Laboratory and Pilot Station, the world's first such facility for the telecom market. Bringing together industrial, institutional and academic partners from the telecommunications world and the alternative energy world, this laboratory has the facilities to analyse, test and validate solutions being offered by the dynamic alternative energy market and how they might meet the needs of the telecommunications industry.
In addition to the advanced research, Alcatel-Lucent is developing a multi-year roadmap to enable its telecom customers to benefit from the best possible alternative energy solutions as soon as the technology becomes available while creating a new market for alternative energy systems vendors.
“The renewable energy base stations developed by Alcatel-Lucent will result in a paradigm shift in the global telecommunications industry. Stakeholders of global IT companies will now see this as the gold standard in triple bottom line innovation. Alcatel-Lucent’s proactive commitment to sustainability has resulted in a solution that will resonate in all markets improving access to global communication and internet services,” said analyst Brad Allen, TBR Program Manager for Global Business Sustainability.
“By providing improved access to modernized communication technologies, Alcatel Lucent has offered a major contribution to the reduction of historical digital divide barriers. TBR also suggests that these base stations when fully deployed, will serve as community-based examples of the potential of progressive renewable energy applications that may promote further development of sustainable energy technologies.”
Leveraging its Sustainable Power services suite, Alcatel-Lucent provides consulting to help operators build a comprehensive deployment plan tailored to their specific environment, and then manages design, dimensioning, installation, transformation and integration of the entire network, for both new deployments or retrofit programs of any base stations.