Cell phone providers are going green this season. This is one of the major news of ecology in our days. Japan’s major cell phone operator, NTT DoCoMo is having plans to start powering its cell phone towers with renewable energy, like solar, biomass or wind.
With the help of this new system, one day it would be possible for the company to produce excess energy that it could sell and another advantage would be that this way it could avoid power grid outages caused by natural disasters such as the tsunami that happened this year.
The company owns 90,000 cell phone relay stations and according to the plans it will start building about 10 renewable energy facilities in 2012 that will produce supplemental energy for the conventional electricity supply.
According to Daisuke Sakuma, the spokesman of the company, NTT DoCoMo is planning ‘green transmission stations’ that would be using eco-energy including bio-fuel cells, solar or wind power.
Still there are some details that have not been decided yet, such as the number of the stations that would be operated in this manner. Nonetheless the possibility of selling the excess power that the company would produce isn’t excluded either.
The main target at this moment is for the facilities to be able to produce enough power to meet the power needs of the company.
One of the major advantages of the new plan is that it would prevent the company from having major blackouts. The tsunami that happened earlier this year knocked out the power lines and because of this the mobile phone services have been out in the majority of the northeast of Japan.
It is a known fact that in case of a major earthquake the services of the company would be disrupted, leading to even more chaos. The plan, besides offering eco-friendly electricity, can also be seen as a measure taken by the company against the ravaging effects of an earthquake.
The plan of the NTT DoCoMo company could be seen as a good example by the other companies. They could switch to producing ‘green electricity’ as well, even though there might not be threatened by quakes or any other natural disasters.
Earth is the only planet that we have and we should realize that it is worth to keep it protected and taken care of. By using such facilities the major companies make an important step for all of us.
