MTN Group president and CEO Phuthuma Nhleko

MTN, Africa’s largest mobile operator, has invested R22m to develop a power-generation plant that it says will halve its electricity costs.

The new plant, which MTN dubs the “tri-generation plant”, will be driven by methane gas, which is plumbed directly into the plant from a gas pipeline 5km away from its head office in Fairlands, west of Johannesburg.

According to MTN SA chief technology officer Sameer Dave, the plant will generate 2MW of power to feed the company’s data centres, switching centres and server rooms.

He says MTN’s Innovation Centre at its head office requires 7MW to function. “Eskom simply does not have the power to give us any more than we already have. We had to find a way of getting more power to our centre,” Dave says.

The project started two years ago, just after Eskom started load-shedding homes and offices across the country. The rolling blackouts hurt SA’s economy and businesses started looking at innovative ways to keep the lights on.

Dave says MTN considered many options, including diesel, solar and wind power. However, he says the new solution was the most efficient since it produces less than 2% of the carbon emissions created using diesel generation.

MTN’s investment in diesel across its African operations is already skyrocketing.

MTN Group president and CEO Phuthuma Nhleko says that in Nigeria alone the cost of diesel is 6% of the company’s operational expenditure. The company spends between US$100m and $150m a year on diesel.

Nhleko says the new plant will halve the cost the SA operation pays on electricity, and he expects the capital investment to be returned within five years. He says the company is looking at similar options for its other African operations.

MTN SA MD Karel Pienaar says using methane is a far greener approach to using diesel generators. “The heat that the methane produces in the process will also be used to power the air conditioning,” he says. — Candice Jones, TechCentral