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Comment by maxsilver | Hacker News Reader

A typical cell tower uses 4kW to 5kW, sometimes less (at least in the states). That's reasonably close to a standard home's central air conditioner, or a home's electric stove/oven/range.

I'd be highly surprised if, of all possible things, this is where they want to cut to lower electricity usage.

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I think it's more about the cell towers being cut at the same time as their local area.

Where it's easy to anticipate that hospitals/police stations/fire birgades will need a special connection to the grid, it probably was harder 20 years ago to realise the numerous new cell towers also needed to be put on a separate connection.

So they'll get cut at the same time as the companies and the houses in the local area.

In France, the talks about the rolling blackouts were acompanied by assurances that private homes wouldn't be affected, only industries.

So they should have some kind of ability to target at least a kind of user. I don't know if cell towers qualify as industry or their own, separate kind.

There's also the fact that there has been a massive rollout of connected meters, so, at least in theory, they could target individual homes for the blackouts (I'm not saying that would be useful in any way).

I don't know if other kinds of endpoints have similar kinds of meters, but they could.

> So they should have some kind of ability to target at least a kind of user.

Industrial power is easier to separate because it is almost always a separate grid region. There aren’t many houses built up against your local steel mill or refinery.

Cell towers are collocated with residential areas because that’s where the users are. The power for homes and cell towers comes from the same source.

Yes. But since power cuts shouldn't affect residential areas, cell towers should also be safe.

I think I'd rather the cut be for everyone.

There are enough people people who hate linky for no reason, I hope EDF won't give them an actual good reason to do so.

> A typical cell tower uses 4kW to 5kW

Just to give some perspective, that figure is less than 2 times what a single Antminer S19 Pro Bitcoin mining appliance draws (found by searching "most used bitcoin mining hardware"). Mining farms contain from hundreds to thousands of these devices (search "antminer farm") kept on 24/7. Also, that model is far from being the most power hungry. And no, they're not only operating in poor countries where energy is cheap: all it takes for whoever operates them is being able to profit more than the cost of energy plus maintenance, no matter where.

Rationing power for cell towers would be pure idiocy that would give nothing in return, while there are well known places where lots of energy is wasted 24/7.

Load shedding occurs in larger regions of the grid.

The utilities don’t have the ability to turn specific sites on and off at random throughout the day.

They can with smartmeters

Wouldn't it be more about the power simply is gone as in that portion of the grid is out? I don't think they run custom circuits just for cell towers as that would be quite expensive, 5G sucks a lot of power and I don't think the backup batteries can last for days on end of a severe power outage.

My understanding is that many have supplemental power options, or at least the ability to be hooked up to a mobile one.

I wouldn't worry about powering the cell tower itself, but more about the backhaul infrastructure that it relies on. In cities it relies on fiber that's often leased from various providers and terminates at datacenters where it shares switching equipment with a lot of other customers of the provider & datacenter, so power can't effectively be segregated. If that datacenter can't be kept powered (and that will require a lot of power), it doesn't matter whether the tower itself remains powered.

Indeed, not particularly, but they will just lose power together with the buildings around them.

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