Huawei recently held its Win-Win Huawei Innovation Week conference, July 18-22, 2022, with a commitment to building “simplified, green and intelligent” Information and Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure. In addition to making recommendations for a joint industry standard for energy efficiency, Huawei also launched its new green development solution at the event held in Shenzhen.
As a keynote speaker, Ryan Ding, president of Huawei’s Carrier Business Group, stressed the need for telecoms operators to prioritize energy efficiency across their networks in his presentation titled, “Green ICT for New Value.”
ABI Research views Huawei as having strong potential as a company for reducing global carbon emissions, due to its ability to scale a sustainable impact across China (the world’s second largest economy) and in more than 170 countries and regions. According to Huawei’s third-party research, data traffic is also expected to increase by 13-fold over 2020 by 2030. That means that if no changes are made by telecoms operators, then the industry’s energy consumption and carbon emissions could increase by 2.3-fold. Huawei’s green development solution is aimed at facilitating change by helping telecoms operators improve energy efficiency and reduce Carbon Dioxide (CO2) emissions as ICT infrastructure continues to evolve from 5G and F5G to 5.5G and F5.5G.
In a following Huawei presentation of multiple sustainability-related sessions, Huawei’s Carrier Business Group Chief Marketing Officer, Philip Song, expanded the green development discussion and introduced specific actions that the company could take to help operators systematically build greener networks. Song noted that improvements in energy efficiency can be made at the site level, the network level and through greener operations, policies and decisions.
ABI Research agrees with this type of all-inclusive approach, as there is no silver bullet for reducing carbon emissions and waste in the telecommunications industry. More specifically, several in-depth reports by ABI Research have shown that a comprehensive combination of switching to renewable energy for purchased electricity, investing in the latest generation Massive Multiple Input, Multiple Output (mMIMO) and other network equipment upgrades, improving network energy efficiency (using innovative materials, intelligent multi-generational site design and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled software), modernizing cooling equipment and promoting more circular systems for devices have all made meaningful contributions to improving sustainability in the industry.
ABI Research also stresses specific actionable plans for clients, laying out a roadmap to reach net zero that takes companies from good intentions (such as setting climate targets) to verifiable execution (following through in reducing emissions). At the Win-Win conference, Huawei discussed various steps that customers could take to reduce carbon emissions. The level of detail provided was perhaps the most encouraging aspect of the green development launch. In the past, industry conferences such as these have been heavier on technological details and lighter on how to advance the technology without further increasing carbon emissions. Sustainability can sometimes be referenced in general terms without much substance beneath the surface. At Win-Win, Huawei demonstrated a more detailed step-by-step commitment to addressing climate change.
At the site level, Huawei highlighted the following as components of the green development solution:
- Move cell sites to fully outdoors. When indoor buildings and facilities are converted to more compact outdoor cabinets, air conditioning may not be required. Moving cabinets closer to active Radio Frequency (RF) equipment on the tower can also reduce cable loss of energy.
- Use new and innovative materials to produce the latest-generation infrastructure and cell site equipment.
- Maximize on-site renewable energy. Huawei offers flexible Photovoltaic (PV) panels and renewable energy storage options to reduce overages when it is sunny and provide options for battery discharge on cloudy days.
- Adopt a highly integrated design of cell sites to support multi-generational equipment.
At the network level, Huawei recommended the following:
- Make networks all optical. According to the World Bank’s World Development Report 2021, replacing vintage copper cable with fiber-optic cable can improve energy efficiency up to 85%.
- Migrate 2G and 3G customers to 4G and 5G services for higher energy efficiency per bit of data traffic.
- Support the construction of simplified, intelligent architecture to manage networks of the future more efficiently.
To improve energy efficiency at the operational level, Huawei offered the following solutions:
- Generate and distribute energy optimization policies. Use standard Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure energy consumption data.
- Use Huawei solutions to assess, manage and better visualize data for decision-making.
Huawei reported that its green development solutions have been deployed by operators in more than 100 countries. In Germany, Huawei’s Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled, multi-band, network energy-saving PowerStar solution has allowed customers to understand their energy efficiency at a granular level. While in Spain, Huawei’s Optical Cross-Connect (OXC) solution has been deployed on a client’s backbone network, improving network energy efficiency by 81% and reducing costs by 29%. In Turkey, Huawei replaced equipment rooms requiring cooling with space-saving cabinets, saving 19,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity per site annually.
Huawei also emphasized that the company and its operator partners have also worked together to develop ICT technologies and increase their collective “carbon handprint.” A carbon handprint describes the positive environmental impact of a product or company. This positive enabling effect, such as 5G enabling AI, automation, edge computing and more for smart cities, smart manufacturing, e-health/telehealth, connected vehicles, etc., allows an operator to enable carbon savings roughly 10X the carbon footprint of its own company’s emissions. ABI Research notes that Huawei indicated in 2021 that 107,000 employees, representing 54.8% of Huawei’s total workforce, worked in Research & Development (R&D). This human capital provides vast potential for designing telecommunications equipment and devices that enable further reductions of carbon emissions and waste across manufacturing, urban development and other industry sectors.
Finally, Huawei has made progress on furthering energy indicator standards across the industry. The Network Carbon Energy Intensity (NCIe) index or energy efficiency indicator system proposed by Huawei has been approved by the United Nations International Telecommunication Union Study Group 5 (ITU-T SG5) and is now in the process of public consultation.
ABI Research recognizes the energy efficiency standards and green development solutions offered by Huawei as concrete, actionable steps that all companies in the telecommunications industry can take to reduce global carbon emissions.
