Optimized Power System Planning for Base Transceiver Station (BTS) based on Minimized Power Consumption and Cost

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.