  There has been a lot of interest recently on the energy efficiency and
environmental impact of wireless networks. Given that the base stations are the
network elements that use most of this energy, much research has dealt with
ways to reduce the energy used by the base stations by turning them off during
periods of low load. In addition to this, installing a solar harvesting sys-
tem composed of solar panels, batteries, charge con- trollers and inverters is
another way to further reduce the network environmental impact and some
research has been dealing with this for individual base stations. In this
paper, we show that both techniques are tightly coupled. We propose a
mathematical model that captures the synergy between solar installation over a
network and the dynamic operation of energy-managed base stations. We study the
interactions between the two methods for networks of hundreds of base stations
and show that the order in which each method is intro- duced into the system
does make a difference in terms of cost and performance. We also show that
installing solar is not always the best solution even when the unit cost of the
solar energy is smaller than the grid cost. We conclude that planning the solar
installation and energy management of the base stations have to be done
jointly.
