Keeping Critical Infrastructure Connected

The challenge

Connectivity depends on power, and network sites are often the least convenient places to keep power running. Many sit far from a dependable grid, unstaffed, reached by road only when the weather allows.

Conventional backup is built for the short outage. A battery bank carries a site through minutes or hours; beyond that, the answer has usually been a diesel generator, and with it a standing commitment to deliver fuel, guard it, and service an engine at a site nobody visits often. When an outage runs for days, the constraint is rarely the equipment. It is the logistics.

How LAVO answers it

LAVO stores energy as hydrogen instead of fuel, and makes it on site.

An electrolyser turns surplus renewable electricity into hydrogen. That hydrogen is held in solid-state metal hydride vessels at low pressure, without compression, and a fuel cell converts it back to electricity on demand. A small lithium-ion buffer covers the fast, short-duration demand while the hydrogen reserve covers duration.

Two properties matter here. Power and energy scale separately, so a site that needs longer runtime adds storage rather than a larger system. And nothing has to be delivered: the reserve is refilled by the same renewable supply that fills it the first time.

Wider application in the sector

Backing up a tower is the narrowest version of what this does for a network.

The same installation shifts an operator from holding a site through an outage to running it independently of the grid — which is what makes a site viable where extending the network would otherwise mean paying to bring power to it. Beyond the tower there are exchanges and core sites, where the outage that matters is longer and the load is larger, and edge compute placed at the base station, which adds a continuous load to sites that were specified for radio equipment alone.

Across an estate, it also changes what an operator is committing to: sites currently held up by diesel represent a standing fuel, maintenance and emissions obligation that scales with the number of sites, and does not fall as the network grows.