Recurring costs

Operating Economics — What Infrastructure Keeps Paying For

VENDOR.Max is an autonomous power system for infrastructure. When an operator buys an energy system, the cost does not end with the equipment. The operator also pays for everything the system requires them to buy, deliver, service and replace over the years that follow. This page is about that second part.

This page contains no technology comparison, no total cost of ownership and no payback period. It asks one question: which costs repeat every month and every year, and which of those repeating layers the VENDOR.Max architecture is designed not to inherit in its primary operating model.

Four layers

Four categories that often drive recurring operating expenses

For autonomous and distributed power infrastructure, four categories commonly drive recurring operating expenses (OPEX): fuel, its delivery, servicing of the combustion system, and storage lifecycle.

Fuel

To keep generating electricity, fuel has to be bought again.

Delivery

Fuel does not reach the site by itself. The more remote the site, the more every litre costs at the point of use.

Combustion servicing

An internal combustion engine carries its own service cycle: oil, filters, scheduled work, wear.

Storage lifecycle

Systems in which availability rests on a large cycling energy-storage system carry their own costs of degradation, capacity maintenance and storage servicing.

The first three are specific to fuel-based generation: removing the fuel cycle removes those items, but it does not remove the servicing of power equipment as such. The fourth arises in systems where continuity rests on large cycling energy storage, regardless of whether a fuel reserve is also present.

Telecoms is used below as a quantitatively well documented reference case for remote infrastructure. The structural items, fuel, delivery and combustion servicing, are not specific to the telecom sector. They are also characteristic of other remote sites where fuel-based generation is used.

Scale of the fuel layer

2.5 bn litres · ≈ USD 3 bn

Diesel and petrol consumed by mobile operators over 2024, at an estimated cost of around USD 3 bn.

Reported, full year 2024Source: GSMA, Mobile Net Zero 2026, ch. 3

Share of operating cost

30–60 %

The share of a mobile operator’s total operating expenditure that buying and transporting diesel can account for, across many countries in Africa.

Reported rangeSource: GSMA

The first figure shows the scale of the fuel layer across the industry. The second shows how significant the combined cost of fuel and its delivery can become in operating economics. The question on this page is not whether a given technology is good or bad, but which costs its architecture forces to repeat.

Operating model

Which recurring costs the architecture does not inherit

VENDOR.Max does not require continuous fuel purchase or fuel delivery, contains no internal combustion engine with its service cycle, and does not rely on a large cycling battery bank as its primary energy-supply layer. This changes the structure of recurring cost, but it does not mean that servicing is unnecessary.

No continuous fuel purchase.
No fuel delivery chain to the site.
No internal combustion engine with its fuel-and-oil service cycle.
No large cycling battery bank required as the primary energy-supply layer.

These are statements about architecture, not about savings in percent. How large the difference is at a given site depends on its consumption profile, remoteness and operating conditions.

The points above describe the architecture of the current product configuration. The full economics of commercial operation has not yet been established on the basis of long-duration field data.

Why continuous fuel purchase is not required is a separate technical question. The architecture and the energy accounting are set out on the How It Works page.

Service model

What remains: our service model, plainly stated

A claim that no servicing is needed is tested by one question: what wears out? What follows is what we know today and what we do not yet know. We do not mix the two.

Scheduled servicing

An annual inspection. Replacement is condition-based and, as a rule, carried out during scheduled servicing. Unscheduled servicing may also be required if a need is identified.

Main known wear component

The patented high-voltage switching assembly. For conservative service planning, up to one replacement per year is allowed for. The target cost of the assembly together with the replacement operation is no more than €100. Site access cost depends on deployment conditions and is not included in that figure.

What is not yet established

The annual interval is a planning assumption, not a confirmed service life. There is not yet enough data to confirm a one-year service life for this assembly specifically. The actual service life will be established through long-duration operation. Other service items are checked within scheduled servicing; long-term intervals for the current product configuration are still being established.

We do not claim zero operating cost. We state what is known and identify what is not yet established.

This page does not calculate the full annual operating cost of VENDOR.Max. It shows which large recurring cost categories the architecture does not inherit, and which service costs are known today.

The economic thesis of VENDOR.Max is not a promise of cheap energy. It is a different structure of operation: the architecture is designed to shift the economic emphasis from continuous fuel purchase and delivery to servicing the equipment itself.

Boundaries

What is not here, and why

The price of VENDOR.Max. Commercial pricing is not fixed.
CAPEX, LCOE, payback, ROI and total cost of ownership. Calculating these correctly requires a fixed commercial price, a fixed product configuration and the corresponding operating assumptions. Comparing the fixed price of an alternative solution with our own price before it is fixed is not methodologically sound.
Technology comparison. Architecture-to-architecture comparison belongs in a separate section.
A confirmed service interval. It is not established.
A claim that no servicing is required. Servicing exists, and it is described above.

Comparative economics may be published once the product configuration, the validation results and the pricing model are fixed. Architecture-to-architecture comparison is covered in the comparison section.

Next steps