UK-based consultancy STL Partners has told Huawei that 5G could save over 250 million tonnes in CO2 emissions in 2030 alone, mainly by accelerating the use of wind and solar energy over fossil fuels.
“This impact over the period 2020-30 is equivalent to almost 1.7 billion tonnes of emissions … or half of all of Canada’s emissions in 2018,” says the briefing.
At the same time Nokia has said that a separate study by it and Telefónica “has found that 5G networks are up to 90% more energy efficient per traffic unit than legacy 4G networks”. Neither company was able to provide Capacity with more detailed information.
The Nokia statement added: “The research, which was conducted over a three-month period, focused on the power consumption of the radio access network (RAN) in Telefónica’s network.”
Telecoms analyst Dean Bubley commented: “‘Up to’ is doing a lot of work in that — and not reflected in the headline wording.” The headline Bubley was referring to said “Nokia confirms 5G as 90% more energy efficient”, without any provisos about traffic scenarios used in the trial.
Nokia said: “Extensive testing examined 11 different pre-defined traffic load scenarios that measured the energy consumed per Mbps based on the traffic load distribution.” It was not clear whether those tests were carried out in the lab or in real-life 5G installations.
Enrique Blanco, the global CTIO of Telefónica, did not respond to Capacity’s request for more details.
Meanwhile Susanna Kass (pictured; credit: Pepperdine University), energy fellow at Stanford University and data centre advisor to the UN Sustainable Development Programme, who is a speaker at our conference Greening The TMT Sector next week, echoed the idea that 5G will support the move to a low-carbon economy.
“The truth is the introduction of 5G is revolutionary,” she told Capacity. “It will accelerate digital transformation to Industry 4.0,” and 5G new radio (NR) technology “offers peak throughput that is a hundred times as fast [as 4G] and one tenth the latency.” It will also permit the use of edge computing, powered by hydrogen fuel cells.
The STL Partners report, which was supported by Huawei, says that 5G will allow wind turbines to be more effective. “Use cases will be an integral part of the future energy ecosystem, where everything will need to be connected — appliances, vehicles, energy networks, trading platforms, distributed generation sources, wholesale markets, renewable energy assets, etc. The scale of this is unprecedented and will be impossible to support across all scenarios using today’s network technologies.”
The consultancy agrees with Nokia’s findings that 5G networks will be more efficient than 4G. “The energy load … of a 5G cell site is 8-15% that of a like-for-like 4G cell site. With mmWave, this has the potential to fall to 1-2% of a 4G macro site,” says the report.
“The forecasted impact of 5G is due to many use cases coming together to make a tangible difference. There is no one application that can substantially shift global carbon emissions, but a combination of solutions that will help businesses reduce energy consumption, allow energy providers to balance their energy sources and produce renewable energy more effectively.”
Meanwhile Capacity asked for more details from Nokia and Telefónica about their study. A Nokia spokesperson told us by email: “I checked with Telefónica about this and the documentation is not for public consumption unfortunately — so isn’t on any public website I’m afraid.”
The official added: “I’ve raised this with them so hopefully they will put it up in the future.”
We put a set of questions directly to Enrique Blanco, the global CTIO of Telefónica, but 48 hours later have not received a reply from him or his team.
The Nokia announcement quoted Juan Manuel Caro, director of operational transformation in Blanco’s global CTIO department at Telefónica: “We are committed to supporting action on climate change and engender a sustainable culture throughout our entire company. We are proud to work collaboratively with Nokia on this project and others to address a range of initiatives including driving energy efficiencies in the 5G era.”
The announcement said: “The results highlighted that 5G RAN technology is significantly more efficient than legacy technologies when it comes to energy consumption per data traffic capacity with several hardware and software features that help to save energy.”
Capacity asked Blanco: “What were the 11 different pre-defined traffic load scenarios Nokia refers to?”
We also asked: “What was the range of variations in energy efficiency?” — a direct reference to Nokia’s comment that “5G networks are up to 90% more energy efficient”, a comment that could lead some to conclude that some of the 11 showed improvements less than 90%. Nokia also did not define the term “energy efficiency”, as used in its announcement.
Tommi Uitto, president of mobile networks at Nokia, said in the announcement: “Our greatest contribution to overcoming the world’s sustainability challenges is through the solutions and technology we develop and provide. We place huge importance on this. Nokia’s technology is designed to be energy efficient during use but also require less energy during manufacture. This important study highlights how mobile operators can offset energy gains during their rollouts helping them to be more environmentally responsible while allowing them to achieve significant cost savings.”
The Nokia announcement, which has still not appeared on Telefónica’s website, even though it cites Telefónica research, says: “5G is a natively greener technology with more data bits per kilowatt of energy than any previous wireless technology generation.”
It adds: “However, 5G networks require further action to enhance energy efficiency and minimize CO2 emissions that will come with exponentially increased data traffic. There are several energy-saving features at the radio base station and network levels, such as 5G power-saving features, small cell deployments and new 5G architecture and protocols, which can be combined to significantly improve the energy efficiency of wireless networks.”
Bubley, in his email to Capacity, added: “And obviously if you’re running a 5G site at max speed with a nearby phone, the energy per *bit* reduces, but as bits transferred increase then total consumption is more.”
He asked: “What’s typical for both new usage and legacy infra?”, questioning “assumptions on spectrum, sharing, up/downlink etc”.
