Creating New Value Through Green ICT

A prominent telecom executive has called for the establishment of a standard, industry-wide indicator system for energy efficiency as operators need to prioritize energy efficiency in their operations.

At the Green Development Solution Launch held on the second day of Win-Win·Huawei Innovation Week, Ryan Ding, President of Huawei’s Carrier Business Group said: “Every major advancement in history has been accompanied by a significant improvement in the energy efficiency of information transmission.

“The increase in carbon emissions generated by exploding data traffic will become a global problem that must be tackled in the next five to ten years. Increasing energy efficiency will be the way forward.”

According to third-party research, data traffic generated by digital services is expected to grow by 13-fold over 2020 by 2030. This means that, if energy efficiency improvements are not made, the ICT industry’s energy consumption and carbon emissions will see a 2.3-fold increase.

ITU has said that the ICT industry will need to reduce its carbon emissions by at least 45% by 2030 to meet the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Paris Agreement’s goal.

Ding said in his keynote speech entitled “Green ICT for New Value” that we are now facing an unprecedented challenges. As more and more industries are going digital, the demand for data will rise sharply, which will result in a surge in energy consumption. In the meantime, the whole world is working to combat climate change, and the ICT industry must urgently achieve carbon peak and carbon neutrality.

Improvements to energy efficiency will benefit operators in three ways. First, user migration, site upgrades, and network power reduction will bring them OPEX savings. Second, improved energy efficiency will support the migration of 2G and 3G users to 4G and 5G services. Third, operators’ efforts to reduce carbon footprint will positively impact the environment, helping them better fulfill their social responsibilities.

To help operators achieve these goals, Huawei has proposed a three-layer solution: green sites, green networks, and green operations.

First, they have developed solutions to improve site energy efficiency by adopting a highly integrated design, using new materials, and moving main equipment and power supply units outdoors.

Second, the company’s simplified network architecture makes forwarding faster and supports the construction of simplified, all-optical, and intelligent networks.

Finally, at the operations level, Huawei offers a solution that generates and distributes optimization policies while making energy efficiency more visualized and manageable.

So far, these green development solutions have been deployed for operators in more than 100 countries. In Germany, for example, Huawei’s PowerStar solution has helped realize minute-level energy efficiency self-optimization, improving energy efficiency greatly while in Spain, Huawei’s optical cross-connect (OXC) solution has been deployed on a customer’s backbone network, increasing energy efficiency by 81% and reducing costs by 29%.

Ding said the establishment of a unified, industry-wide indicator system would help establish baselines against which energy efficiency can be measured and serve as a guide for the green development of the ICT industry as a  whole.

“Huawei is ready to work with operators and create new value with green ICT,” he said, adding that the NCIe energy efficiency indicator system proposed by Huawei has been approved by ITU-T SG5 and is now in the process of public consultation.