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KANSAS CITY, Mo. — When wireless industry technicians speak of “green” cell towers these days, they’re not just talking about making them look more like trees.
They’re talking about towers powered by wind turbines or solar panels, antennas that get backup energy from hydrogen fuel cells and geothermal cooling for computer equipment.
Cell phone companies are experimenting with these and other strategies to reduce their increasingly ubiquitous industry’s environmental impact.
To be sure, the “greening” of wireless communication is still in its infancy. The vast majority of the nation’s more than 200,000 cell towers and antennas run off the same electric grid everybody else does. And even companies experimenting with alternative energy plan to limit its use to backup power.
The average cell tower requires four to eight times as much power as a typical household, and cell companies say power from conventional supplies is still cheap compared to alternative sources. They say they would use green power mainly in remote areas where towers don’t face the same aesthetic and zoning limits as in neighborhoods and cities.