U.S. Carriers Behind European Counterparts on Making Networks Green
Telecom providers worldwide vary widely on how far they have gone toward a goal of building networks with zero carbon emissions, speakers said at a TelecomTV virtual green network summit, which ended Thursday. European providers, on average, appear further along than those in the U.S., speakers said.
Overall, the telecom industry “is very committed, people want to make this happen, they want to drive towards net zero, but they’re just at different stages in their journey,” said Philip Laidler, consultant at STL Partners. “Some have been doing it for longer, they’ve gotten further, they’ve put more in place,” he said. Other companies are “playing catch up,” he said. “European operators ... started sooner,” Laidler said. Others, including in the U.S., are behind: “That isn’t down to commitment, it’s down to when they started.”
There's no single, internationally recognized definition of net-zero network, said Jacek Hutyra, Orange Poland climate officer. That “opens up some space for some actors to play around with words,” he said: “Net zero, climate neutrality, net-climate neutrality -- sometimes it means the same thing, sometimes it doesn’t.”
There are international guidelines, and the Orange Group uses those from the Science Based Targets initiative, Hutyra said. That means “we are actually looking at the entire emissions, across the full value channel of our activities,” he said. Telecoms and other companies can announce targets and then can get away with explaining very briefly what term they're using, he said.
Orange Poland’s goal, consistent with the rest of Orange Group, is net-zero emissions by 2040, Hutyra said. In Poland, more than 70% of electricity comes from coal-fired power plants, “which makes it quite, quite, quite difficult to decarbonize, which is why we have to go faster, and we have to do more,” he said.
Verizon Cloud Strategist Beth Cohen said monitoring and controlling energy use will get much more difficult as networks become more complicated and push toward the edge. “We have hundreds of thousands, or possibly millions, of access points, particularly if you figure in the infrastructure to support mobile networks,” Cohen said. Energy management becomes “a game of whack-a-mole,” she said. As providers move their operations to the edge they use less power in their core, “at the same time core power generally is greener, and it’s more efficient,” she said.
Distributed networks give companies more control of energy use, said Maria Lema, co-founder of software company Weaver Labs. “Distributed networks will allow us to power on and off our assets based on the needs and the congestion,” she said. “Edge can be a way to reduce power consumption when aided with the proper technology,” she said.
Edge is still in early stages and is “still being defined,” said Tuoyo Ebigbeyi, American Tower vice president-innovation and strategy-energy. Energy demands are “very use-case dependent,” he said. Many applications are being developed “if you think about the metaverse, if you think about low-latency and high-end gaming … that are going to dictate the amount of energy consumption,” he said.
Edge data centers will vary widely in their power demand, from 100 kilowatts, up to 1 megawatt, Ebigbeyi said. There will be a “massive range in terms of deployment, space availability and capacity requirements,” he said. Carriers, content distributors, infrastructure companies and others will have to “come together to help define the edge and make it energy efficient as we evolve towards the edge,” he said.