Last Updated 13 years ago by Kenya Engineer
Frequent electricity outages in Kenya caused by natural causes such as falling trees during rainy weather and vandalism of transmitters and transmission wires have seen to Kenya’s leading telecommunication service provider seeking alternative power solutions.
Safaricom announced its investment plan of Sh96 million to purchase back-up batteries for its cell towers in a bid to address frequent network outages caused by recurrent power blackouts. This follows the company’s setbacks brought about by blackouts.
CEO,Bob Collymore pointed that its cell sites connected to the national grid experienced up to four hours of electricity blackouts daily, leading to network glitches, loss of business and high operations costs.
US firm General Electric, who will install the batteries have already installed 48 such batteries at the telco’s base stations which are not connected to a standby diesel generator and are located mostly on rooftops around the Nairobi metropolis area.
The batteries dubbed Durathon will provide backup power to the towers to keep calls connected during power blackouts and can also be used to drive industrial plants.
Safaricom, which has about 1,700 base stations in Kenya, has turned to solar energy to power some of its cell towers located in regions that receive abundant sunlight.The company uses diesel-powered generators for stations in off-grid areas, which use an average of 35 litres of fuel daily.
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