Hybrid power on 70 sites, some reachable only by air

The operator is building broadband coverage across Papua New Guinea, almost 500,000 sq km of mostly rural land with limited road infrastructure. Tower sites sit on ridges and in terrain where the only practical access is by air. Every one of them needs power that runs continuously, because a site that goes dark takes the connectivity of the surrounding region with it.

Diesel is the default answer in this situation and a poor one. Fuel has to be flown or carried in, service engineers face the same journey, and a routine filter change turns into a helicopter charter. The operator set out to cut diesel out of the picture, hold resilience at a level suitable for mission critical telecom load, and bring the cost of keeping these sites running down to a figure that scales across the whole network.

Bladon and Ryse Energy have worked together since 2021, pairing Ryse renewable generation with the Bladon microturbine genset as the firming source. Ryse supplied AIR Max wind turbines, 2 MW of bifacial solar PV and 3.4 MWh of 100 Ah LFP battery storage. Bladon supplied MTG12 microturbine gensets with smart remote metering, sized to carry each site whenever wind and sun cannot.

The hybrid system delivers up to 90 percent renewable power, with the microturbine covering the balance and holding the uptime the network depends on. The Bladon unit runs on diesel, kerosene, paraffin, HVO or any blend of them, so the operator can use whichever fuel actually reaches a given site.

Equipment for the hardest sites was flown in by helicopter and commissioned on the ridge.

Diesel displacement runs above 90 percent across the deployed sites, which takes both the carbon and the fuel logistics burden off the network. The balance is carried by a machine needing one service visit a year, taking under an hour, whatever the run hours. On a site reached by helicopter the service schedule is the cost, so moving from a monthly diesel routine to a single annual visit changes the economics of operating in this terrain.

The programme has scaled to 70 hybrid sites. Ryse Energy has more than 180,000 installations across all seven continents, and this deployment shows what the two companies deliver together where road access ends.