The enormous growth of mobile telecommunications and data-intensive Internet usage have caused the telecom industry to spend more on infrastructure over the last decade than over the previous lifetime of the industry. This growth translates into the need for increasing amounts of power and energy services. A new report from Navigant Research, which looks at the growth of distributed generation and energy storage within the telecom industry, finds that the technologies will grow by about five times from 2015 to 2024.
Navigant Research expects that the global telecom industry will consume more than 430 TWh of electricity in 2015, according to its report “Distributed Generation and Energy Storage in Telecom Networks.”
Navigant estimates that global telecom network providers will spend $2.4 billion on distributed generation and energy storage purchases in 2015. The vast majority of those purchases will go toward conventional uninterruptable power supply (UPS) systems. That number will grow to $3.4 billion in 2024, at which point, other forms of distributed generation and energy storage – and alternative aggregation and optimization platforms – will account for more than half of the market.