China’s tech giant Huawei has called for more innovation to create synergies between digitalisation and decarbonisation as it believes that technology will enable businesses to reduce their carbon footprint.
In a report that highlights the role of information and communications technology (ICT) in a cleaner and sustainable future entitled titled Green Development 2030, Huawei maps out its vision where data centres running on artificial intelligence (AI) will be powered by solar photovoltaic (PV) plants, and virtual factories staffed by robots will enable efficient manufacturing cycles.
The firm predicts that by the end of this decade, all new buildings around the world will operate at net-zero carbon and there will be large-scale electrification in transportation, from cars to aviation and shipping.
In the study, Huawei estimated that only 20 percent of businesses are currently using digital technology, and green development will require increased penetration of digital technology across all sectors.
“While the ICT industry itself accounts for less than 2 percent of global carbon emissions, it is a leverage point that can be exploited to achieve disproportionate and higher emissions reductions,” said Huawei, which is predicting carbon emissions reductions enabled by digital solutions to hit at least 20 percent of global emissions by 2030.
Currently, renewable energy makes up 28.6 percent of the global electricity generation, and Huawei’s vision is for the ratio to increase to 50 percent by 2030, making renewables mainstream. Key to this is a strong solar push, as it predicts that solar power is set to become a major source of electricity.
It imagines offshore floating PVs and wind turbines to be a common sight by the end of the next decade. Power plants will also become highly digitised.
“With a converged, open, and intelligent energy cloud, virtual power plants will break down boundaries between traditional power plants and users, and coordinate distributed wind energy, solar PV, energy storage systems, and other flexible loads.”
Huawei also called for the energy efficiency of digital infrastructure itself to be vastly improved. The growth of the digital economy creates additional energy demands as new ICT infrastructure needs to be powered, yet this should not deter investment into such infrastructure. Instead, the ICT sector should lead the way and search for innovative and effective solutions in order to meet these demands.
This is especially as more countries and regions start embracing green development. Huawei urged further breakthroughs in digital technology and greater coordination between different industries. Regulations, systems and standards across various sectors need to be clear and standardised. “This will require joint innovation in both digital technology and low carbon growth, as well as greater collaboration across all communities, industries, value chains and ecosystems.”
“Digital innovation is key to achieving low-carbon growth. The two are mutually reinforcing, so we need to keep strengthening investment in research and development to deliver the right enabling technologies.”
The report points out that the ICT industry currently lacks a unified standard to measure the carbon emissions of digital infrastructure and suggests the creation of an index to establish unified standards for better management of the industry’s energy consumption and carbon footprint.
“On one hand, carriers from different countries and regions adopt different approaches to network rollout. On the other hand, digital infrastructure covers numerous domains, and its carbon emissions vary greatly across domains, making it almost impossible to fully achieve green and efficient operations.”
Huawei also envisions for networks to be reconstructed based on the nature of the services they carry, allowing for energy-efficient routing. Data centres, which currently account for about 1 per cent of global electricity consumption, need to adopt evaporative cooling technology and AI.
The firm highlighted its Gui’an Data Centre in China which has green and intelligent technologies incorporated into its design, and which adopts indirect evaporative cooling technology and AI to increase energy efficiency.
The centre, which will be able to accommodate one million servers after full completion, has a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.12, and generates 810,000 tonnes fewer carbon emissions every year compared with a conventional one.
Although more countries and regions are embracing green development, the world still lacks unified standards for low-carbon growth, the report stated. “We still have many challenges ahead; we need to make further breakthroughs in digital technology, flesh out regulations, systems and standards, and promote greater coordination between different industries.”