Alternative energy consumption

Base station running on Hydrogen

After long preparation and in cooperation with experts of leading American and Hungarian firms specializing in the required technology, T-Mobile has become the first in Europe to put into operation a base station fuelled by a PEM (Proton Exchange Membrane) cell, i.e. hydrogen. By applying this state-of-the-art technology combined with other environment-friendly solutions, fully “green” base stations can be built, which do not require diesel generators, batteries and air-conditioning, thus reducing energy consumption and CO2 emission.

The PEM-fuelled base station puts T‑Mobile’s (Magyar Telekom’s) experts into a leading position in European comparison, too, as similar experiments have been conducted with only a few base stations in Sweden.

This environment-friendly development is an important milestone in Magyar Telekom’s environment-conscious efforts. The Company plans to apply the PEM technology for a wide range of purposes, primarily for emergency power supply, as well as for any technical solutions where the energy and operational costs savings thus enabled may result in a realistic return on investment.

You can find more info in the related contents box.

Heat Pump

Magyar Telekom has heat pumps in operation in two of its facilities. Heat pumps make use of residual technological heat. This practice is without any precedent in Hungary. The use of alternative energy sources offers many benefits: our dependence on external energy sources can be reduced to the minimum, our heating-cooling costs can be cut, and we can considerably reduce gas emissions that are causing the greenhouse effect and local air pollution through replacing fossil fuel.  

What is a heat pump? In normal operation it looks very much like a fridge operating just the opposite way and collecting heat from the environment (water, air, soil) and the residual, lower heat left over by technological processes. Bringing (pumping) such heat to a higher temperature (gas warms up if condensed) through mechanical work, it can be used for heating or warming up water. The process therefore requires energy input which is a fraction of the useful energy being generated (less than 25 per cent in an optimal case). This may be electric current from the grid, or some renewable energy source (a solar collector in most cases). In the reverse mode, the equipment can be used for cooling.  

In our case when we obtain energy from the residual heat left over from technological processes, a greater energy saving can be achieved than with an average heat pump as energy saving occurs on the cooling side also. The use of the equipment allows us to save relatively parallel costs. In our case the cooling equipment relies on the heat generating in the technology facilities even in winter, and we let this heat into the open air at a relatively high cost through the condensers. On the other hand we use the relatively costly natural gas or district heating for heating and warming up water. The deployment of the above-mentioned heat pumps replaces cooling equipment and uses the technological heat that has been wasted so far partly for heating buildings and, partly for warming up water.  

Switching to the use of heat pumps may, apart from reducing environmental load, result in cost-saving…

Hybrid car

Hybrid-powered cars have been added to Magyar Telekom’s vehicle pool. Leading employees of the company may select hybrids as of the fall of 2007 for use as company cars. The price difference of the more expensive cars in their respective category is halved between the company and the respective employee. Hybrids appear to be popular among employees as 50 of them have chosen this type of car until October 2008. Christopher Mattheisen Chairman-CEO of the company was the first who ordered hybrid-powered car.

Cooling base stations with open air

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Energy-efficient cooling systems introduced in 2006 continued to be deployed in 2007 and thus they have been installed on 1021 container stations. The aim of the innovative technological development patented by Magyar Telekom is to drastically reduce the energy consumption and improve the operating safety of the network. Target equipment has been air conditioning units providing for the cooling of base stations, which started to operate with direct open air cooling. The company managed to achieve a considerable energy saving by reducing by 40-75% the operating time of air conditioning. More details about the development are available in the Sustainability Report of 2006
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