Can the telecoms industry power down its impact on the environment?

The most recent report from the IPCC (Intergovernmental panel on climate change) makes for sober reading, stating unequivocally that human activity is changing the Earth’s climate in unprecedented and sometimes irreversible ways. The report’s release comes less than three months before the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, and should give pause to the telecoms industry.

UN Secretary General António Guterres said: "If we combine forces now, we can avert climate catastrophe. But, as today's report makes clear, there is no time for delay and no room for excuses. I count on government leaders and all stakeholders to ensure COP26 is a success.”

The telecoms industry uses a staggering 2% to 3% of the total power consumption of humanity. Unlike aviation or heavy industry, however, telecom companies tend not to be grouped among the worst environmental offenders. Indeed, we are often portrayed as part of the solution as we facilitate smarter working, for example in the form of more resource efficient manufacturing. Nonetheless, our energy consumption is rising fast, hand in hand with data traffic, increasing our industry’s responsibility for climate change. The entire communications industry impacts the environment in multiple ways, including through the generation of e-waste. The GSMA estimates that around 50 million tons of e-waste are produced every year – a figure that continues to rise. As the industry stands on the cusp of growth in 5G services and cloud-based edge computing, we thought it would be useful to take a look at the problem of energy consumption and the extent innovation can decouple it from the growth in data usage.

Telco power consumption is still rising

Everything points to people, machines and systems massively increasing their use of networked applications and services. Ericsson’s June 2021 Mobility Report calculated that global mobile traffic reached 49 exabyte (EB) per month at the end of 2020 and forecasts it will increase nearly fivefold to reach 237EB per month in 2026, with a single exabyte being an almost unimaginably huge 1, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 bytes.

[Source: Ericsson Mobility Report]

As data traffic grows the amount of power it takes to run telecommunications networks – and the source of that power – is the environmental elephant in the room. The latest cycle of technology investments around 5G and cloud operations are often discussed in terms of driving down power consumption on a per unit basis, but many new network deployments have a net increase in overall consumption.

Consider 5G. The 5G NR radio access network (RAN) standard was intentionally designed to be more energy efficient per gigabyte when compared with 4G LTE. However, RAN densification means that many more antenna sites are needed and along with that power and new infrastructure. So, effectively 5G will increase energy usage.

Additionally, edge computing will drive the construction of a more distributed data center model, which again means more power and more infrastructure as edge servers run flat out to guarantee low latency and high reliability of services around the clock.

Switching to renewables

One way to tackle the problem is to use renewable sources of energy, such as wind or solar power. The EU’s recent ‘Fit for 55’ ambition, which sets out goals to reduce the EU’s net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030 compared to 1990 levels, will set a target to produce 40% of the EU’s energy from renewable sources by 2030. Vodafone is a good example of how CSPs are addressing the power challenge through renewables. It committed in 2019 to purchasing all electricity from renewable sources and halving its environmental footprint by 2025, as well as reusing, reselling or recycling 100% of its network waste. The operator announced that it will be running its European network on 100% renewable electricity by the end of this year, four years earlier than planned, with power coming solely from wind, solar or hydro sources. Vodafone is not alone. The GSMA has set a goal for the mobile industry to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. As part of the program currently 57 operators, or 67 per cent of the industry by connections, have agreed to disclose their climate impact and many are also embracing renewable energy sources. However, the recourse to renewable energy may not be as straightforward a solution as it first appears, especially as the use of cloud and edge computing grows.

How clean is the cloud?

In 2018, data centers accounted for 2.7% of the electricity demand in EU 28. The EU expects data center energy consumption to increase by 21% to reach 92.6 TWh/a by 2025 with cloud data centers accounting for 60% of the energy consumption of data centers and edge data centers 12%. The problem is global and tricky to address partly because cloud data centers are already very energy efficient, according to the authors of Enabling Sustainable Clouds: The Case for Virtualizing the Energy System. After all, it makes sound financial sense for cloud companies to invest in reducing their biggest operational costs – namely power consumption across hardware, software and cooling systems.

“There are few significant remaining opportunities left to further optimize energy-efficiency, as many cloud data centers already operate near peak efficiency,” according to the paper, which was written by US university researchers at Caltech, UMass Amherst and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) Massachusetts. “As a result, cloud platforms can no longer rely on improving their energy efficiency to mitigate their energy growth. Thus, moving forward, the cloud’s continued exponential growth is likely to translate directly into exponentially rising energy demand,”

The limitations of carbon offsets

Meanwhile, today’s approaches to using renewable energy can only take the industry so far. Often sources of renewable energy are not located anywhere near cloud data centers, and renewable energy typically does not directly power them, according to the paper. Instead, a “carbon neutral” company could simply purchase enough carbon offsets in a year to balance its carbon emissions, while powering its operations with non-renewable energy. Purchasing carbon offsets, whether it takes the form of subsidizing renewable energy projects or purchasing renewable energy credits is not a long-term solution, according to the paper – especially as more companies move towards the goal of zero carbon, which will increase competition to offset. The authors give the example of Google, which aims to be carbon free by 2030 by moving beyond offsets to completely remove carbon from its energy supply. Earlier this year, Google launched Time-based Energy Attribute Certificates (T-EACs), which are a form of carbon offset that recognizes that grid carbon emissions vary over time and by location, and help companies use energy from the grid when and where carbon emissions are low. The paper’s authors, however, argue that carbon offset mechanisms are transitional and may discourage the operational changes needed to address the root of the problem.

“Carbon offsets disincentivize, and may actually delay, these operational changes by providing a means for reducing carbon emissions for less than it would cost to make…changes,” they write.

Instead, they suggest a “carbon first” approach in which cloud computing applications are capable of adapting to when and where low-carbon energy, such as solar or wind-energy is available. It’s an approach that would marry well with edge computing. Currently energy moves to where computation takes place. In the proposed model, computation would move to renewable energy sources, which the authors argue is more efficient because it involves moving tiny amounts of energy in the form of the bits.

“We envision sustainable clouds will include many smaller, more widely distributed, micro data centers that are largely self-powered, primarily using solar and batteries and the difference in cost will only grow as solar prices continue to decline.”

In addition, they see cloud applications being equipped with the ability to automatically manage energy use efficiently. Their idea is to “virtualize the energy system by exposing visibility into, and software-defined control of, it to cloud applications, providing them the flexibility to define their own abstractions for managing energy.”

A multi-pronged approach

Making it possible for cloud applications to play a role in energy management is just one possible solution that may or may not come to fruition. When it comes to increasing the energy efficiency of their networks in the here and now, CSPs are looking to a number of solutions. Orange, for example, points to advances in the integration and densification of the components of Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (Massive MIMO) antenna.

“While a 5G antenna consumes three times more energy on average today than a 4G antenna, this ratio is expected to drop to 50% by 2021 and 25% by 2022, according to Eric Hardouin, Director of the Ambient Connectivity Research, Orange Labs Research, in a recent blog. “Above all, for this energy consumption, a 5G antenna manages a bandwidth five times higher and can deliver a higher throughput to serve more users simultaneously.”

CSPs and equipment suppliers are also deploying power machine learning and AI to improve the energy efficiency. One example is to reduce the average power consumption of cell sites by dynamically predicting cell usage so that certain cells can be put out of service temporarily without impacting customer experience. CSPs can also reduce their energy consumption as they replace legacy equipment with less power-hungry systems.

Awareness is growing

Taking all of the above into consideration, the telecoms industry obviously has a complex set of goals to address. At the same time lots is happening to move us in the right direction. When reading CSPs’ annual reports, it has been noticeable how many include ever-expanding sections on the green credibility of the company. It is of course, hard to rationalize the cheery attitude of the shareholder reports with the evidence of the IPCC report. It seems that the subtext is this: Organizations in all facets of the ICT industry must do much more in the coming years to address sustainability.