Combating the World Energy Trilemma

The global population, which continues to expand rapidly, is constantly demanding more and more energy. Every business sector, in every area of every country, is calling for additional power supplies, for domestic heating and lighting, manufacturing, transportation, commerce and food production. Yet, each of those nations is also facing what the World Energy Council (WEC) calls the World Energy Trilemma.

The organisation describes the three areas of the Trilemma like this:

Energy Security - This is a measure of a nation’s capacity to meet current and future energy demand reliably, to withstand and bounce back swiftly from system shocks with minimal disruption to supplies. The dimension covers the effectiveness of management of domestic and external energy sources, as well as the reliability and resilience of energy infrastructure.

Energy Equity – Assessing a country’s ability to provide universal access to reliable, affordable and abundant energy for domestic and commercial use. The dimension captures basic access to electricity and clean cooking fuels and technologies, access to prosperity-enabling levels of energy consumption and affordability of electricity, gas and fuel.

Environmental Sustainability – Represents the transition of a country’s energy system towards mitigating and avoiding potential environment harm and climate change impacts. The dimension focuses on productivity and efficiency of generation, transmission and distribution, decarbonisation and air quality.

The WEC creates an annual index, ranking the performance of 127 countries on these three dimensions. This highlights the challenges that countries face, as they try to balance the three often conflicting areas of the trilemma. Making energy systems secure, equitable and environmentally sustainable are the prime aims for all countries, but also for many companies, as they strive to provide customers with affordable, clean energy for a wide range of uses.

Across the world, communication plays a vital role within the community. For domestic and business users, having access to reliable telecoms technology can be crucial. To meet this need, there are currently more than 1m telecom towers across the world, in many cases operating off-grid. To power this mobile requirement, more than 250,000 diesel-powered generators a year are supplied to site, delivering either main or back-up electricity for telecoms sites. Between them, they create around 7m tonnes of CO2 each year.

Bladon Micro Turbine is able to supply telecoms businesses with an alternative to the diesel generator, a 12kW power system that meets all three aims of the energy trilemma. The Bladon micro turbine genset (MTG) has been specifically designed to meet the needs of telecoms tower providers, while moving towards a more sustainable future.

With more than 200 site installations, across five continents, Bladon’s MTG has in excess of 1m hours of reliable operation. There is just one moving part within the turbine, running at speeds of up to 130,000rpm in air bearings, with no lubricating oil to change and dispose of. The MTG offers up to 40,000 hours for fuel-agnostic use, with service intervals of up to 1 year in most environments. This results in 95% lower service costs for operators, with fewer miles travelled by engineers, further saving fuel and cutting emissions.

The turbine can operate with the widest range of fuels, without any change to components or design. This means that operators can mix fuels, to make them less attractive to fuel theft on site, or simply use whatever fuel is available in that region.

Depending on availability, companies can also operate with a wide range of biofuels and Bladon has already developed the MTG to operate on hydrogen-based fuels in the future.

Testing the Technology

Vodafone is currently working with a number of partners, to carry out renewable power generation proof-of-concept trials across mobile access sites, following the conclusion of its Renewable Power Challenge competition last year. Bladon has been supplying Vodafone Group business Vodacom, in South Africa, for some time. Now the company is offering customers like Vodacom the ability to transition from diesel, through sustainably resourced hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) to renewable hydrogen, over the coming years.

Bladon’s micro turbines can also be combined with a range of renewable resources, including solar, wind and battery storage solutions.

“100% renewable energy never equals 100% availability,” said Stuart Kelly, Bladon’s VP of market development.

“With the MTG, we can give you a way to keep one hand on diesel, but embrace other kinds of fuels, without changing anything in the engine. We’re embracing new, low carbon fuels, including hydrogen and we’re reducing the headaches that people have about moving away from a reliance on diesel, by giving you a progressive way to take steps to net zero.”

Secure, equitable and environmentally sustainable power may sound like an unachievable goal for the future. However, Bladon is working to help customers across the world to achieve this end today, creating deployable solutions to the energy trilemma for telecoms providers, as they continue their progress to the net zero future of tomorrow.