Abbott Technologies Cut Energy Costs for Offgrid Telecom Sites by Over 50% with Bladon Microturbine Gensets

Announced at TowerXchange MENA, Bladon and Abbott Technologies marked three years cutting off-grid telecom site costs by more than 50% in South Africa.

Announced at the TowerXchange MENA Meetup on 30 March 2021, Bladon and its Southern African partner Abbott Technologies marked more than three years of deploying microturbine generators (MTGs) across sites for major South African mobile networks and tower companies, reporting operating cost savings of over 50% per site per year.

Rising demand, unreliable power

The deployment came against a backdrop of roughly 200% growth in mobile broadband demand in South Africa's urban areas, a surge that put sustained pressure on network operators to keep towers running reliably. That pressure was compounded by ongoing utility load shedding across the country, which left many towers without dependable access to grid power even where a grid connection existed in principle.

A significant number of towers in the networks Abbott Technologies serviced had been deployed without any grid access at all, leaving operators reliant entirely on on-site generation to keep towers powered around the clock.

The limits of the traditional approach

The conventional answer to powering an off-grid tower is a diesel generator paired with a bank of batteries, sometimes supplemented with solar panels. In practice, that approach carries a heavy operating cost. Diesel gensets typically require service visits as often as twice a month, each one adding cost and logistical complexity, particularly at remote sites. Diesel fuel stored on unmanned or lightly manned sites is also a persistent target for theft, a problem that erodes both uptime and budget. And diesel generators bring noise and exhaust emissions that are increasingly unwelcome at sites located near residential areas.

What three years of Bladon deployment delivered

Replacing that model with Bladon microturbine gensets, Abbott Technologies reported operating and maintenance cost savings of over 50% per site per year across the networks it served. The single-moving-part, air-bearing design of the microturbine eliminated the need for engine oil and liquid coolant entirely, removing both a recurring consumable cost and a maintenance task associated with conventional diesel engines.

Perhaps most significantly for site operators managing large, dispersed tower networks, service visit frequency fell from as often as twice a month under the diesel model to just once a year with the Bladon microturbine gensets in place. For a tower company or mobile network operator managing hundreds or thousands of remote sites, that reduction in required site visits represented a substantial cut in logistics costs, labour and exposure to the risks of frequent remote-site access.

A proven track record

By the time of the March 2021 announcement, the partnership between Bladon and Abbott Technologies had run for more than three years, giving both companies a substantial base of real-world operating data from major South African mobile networks and tower companies. That track record was presented at TowerXchange MENA as evidence that microturbine generators could deliver a durable, lower-cost alternative to diesel across off-grid telecom infrastructure at meaningful scale.

This article is part of the Bladon archive and reflects the position at the date of publication.