Since Friday, eight small wind turbines have been supporting the system’s power supply on a Vodafone mobile phone mast in Troisdorf near Cologne. The operator of the 70 meter high mast is the Dusseldorf company Vantage Towers. A total of 52 of the company’s cell phone stations are to be equipped with 8 to 16 micro wind turbines each, as Vodafone announced on Friday. “In regular operation, a significant part of the energy requirement is covered, under optimal conditions even up to 100 percent,” it said. In Troisdorf, the eight turbines are fixed at a height of 40 meters on all four sides of the tower.
All of the electricity generated by the planned 752 small turbines from Mowea is to be used to operate the cell phone systems in the Vodafone network. Vantage Towers expects the plants to produce around 650,000 kilowatt hours of electricity annually. For comparison: This amount of electricity corresponds to the annual consumption of around 200 households.
“By installing wind turbines on mobile phone masts, the radio systems can become a little more self-sufficient,” said North Rhine-Westphalia’s Economics Minister Mona Neubaur (Greens) at the official commissioning on Friday. This is a strong and innovative signal.
The mast in Troisdorf is not the first in Germany where wind power was generated and used for broadcasting. As early as 2011, E-Plus (now O2/Telefónica) opened a location in East Westphalia that also drew its electricity from its own wind turbine.
Vodafone has been using 100 percent electricity from renewable sources since 2020, the company emphasized. According to their own statements, the other two mobile network operators in Germany also use green electricity exclusively to operate their mobile networks: Telefónica (O2) since 2016 and Deutsche Telekom since 2021.
