Bharti Airtel - Green Initiative

Green Initiative

GreenTowers P7 program

Bharti Infratel is the only telecom tower company, which has installed almost 3 MWT of solar capacity on their network, generating more than 5 million units of electricity every year. The Green Towers P7 program is scoped for 22,000 tower sites (primarily rural areas having low or no Grid Power availability) out of which 5,500 sites have already been implemented in the first year as a part of this 3-year program. Once completed, the initiative will reduce diesel consumption by 66 million liters per year with a significant carbon dioxide reduction of around 150,000 MT per year. Bharti Infratel bagged the 2011 'Green Mobile Award ' at the GSMA Mobile World Congress at Barcelona and was also awarded the 2010 innovative infrastructure company of the year award at the CNBC Infrastructure Awards for this groundbreaking initiative. Bharti remains the first company in the world to introduce the practice of sharing of passive infrastructure by collaborating with their competition to share mobile towers and to reduce the collective carbon footprint of the industry. This has become a subject of case studies in institutions including the Harvard Business School.

Energy Conservation

The company has installed solar hot water generator at its main campus in Gurgaon for fulfilling the hot water requirement in the cafeteria. Majority of its facilities across NCR region are now equipped with LES (Lighting Energy Savers) which have reduced energy consumption in the lighting system to the tune of 10–25%. Variable Frequency Drives installed in AHU (Air Handling Unit) at its campus have helped in enhancing the efficiency of cooling system by 10%. These measures have resulted in a total saving of 8.5 lakh units of electricity per year.

Airtel has embarked upon technology related initiatives like virtualization of servers that has helped it release over 500 CPUs. Also the drive of sending e-bills to the post-paid customers is helping save 12,840 trees annually. Within its campus the ‘Secure Print Solution' – an automated queue management based secured printing solution has led to an annualized saving of about 8 metric tonnes of paper.

• Alternate energy sources such as solar energy used at 1050 sites saving 6.9 mn litres of diesel and approximately 280 million.

• Energy efficiency measures such as Integrated Power Management Systems and variable speed DC generators have resulted in reduction in the rate of diesel consumption by 1.2 million litres, leading to savings of 47 million across 900 sites.

• Demand side management like Free Cooling Units (FCU) instead of air conditioners has been implemented across 3400+ sites, saving consumption of 4.1 million liters of diesel.