American Tower Corporation (ATC) has highlighted its sustainability commitment in its recent report, as the company revealed it has cut direct emissions by 11 percent.

The tower infrastructure’s African subsidiary, ATC Africa, also reported that it has cut direct greenhouse emissions per tower by 21 percent against its 2019 baseline.

This reduction, ATC says, is due to the increased deployment of on-site solar power, which has nearly doubled the renewable energy source hours since 2019. As a result, the reliance on diesel generators has significantly decreased. 

ATC has invested approximately $300 million in energy reduction initiatives in Africa since 2018, leading to a decrease in on-site diesel consumption by almost 43.5 million liters annually and avoiding roughly 117,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. 

Referring to a pilot back in 2021, which saw 80 ATC sites in Africa use a cloud-based energy management systems (EMS) program to improve energy efficiency the company said that it rolled the program to other markets a year later.

Marek Busfy, CEO, American Tower Africa said the effort allowed the company to continue growing in a region “where connectivity is increasingly vital but power availability and reliability are recurrently uncertain.”

ATC, which operates over 220,000 telecom towers across the world, and 22,000 sites across Africa adopted science-based GHG emissions reduction goals, approved by the SBTi (Science Based Targets initiative), to improve sustainability measures.