Ryan Ding (pictured), speaking in a conference at the company’s headquarters in Shenzhen, said companies need to prioritise energy efficiency, and he called for a standard, industry-wide indicator system.
“The increase in carbon emissions generated by exploding data traffic will become a global problem that must be tackled in the next five to ten years. Increasing energy efficiency will be the way forward,” said Ding, who is president of Huawei’s carrier business group.
He said data traffic generated by digital services is expected to grow by 13-fold over 2020 by 2030, citing third-party research. This means that, if energy efficiency improvements are not made, the industry’s energy consumption and carbon emissions will see a 2.3-fold increase.
Ding was speaking as parts of Spain hit a record 43°C, France experiences widespread wildfires and even the parts of the UK saw temperatures as high as 40.3°C – beating the British record by more than 1°.
“We are now facing an unprecedented challenge,” said Ding. “As more and more industries are going digital, the demand for data will rise sharply, which will result in a surge in energy consumption. In the meantime, the whole world is working to combat climate change, and the ICT industry must urgently achieve carbon peak and carbon neutrality.”
Ding told the conference: “It seems that we have never faced such a severe situation. On the one hand, the digitalization of thousands of industries will greatly increase the traffic demand, and objectively, the total energy consumption will increase rapidly.”
He said that Huawei has proposed a three-layer solution: green sites, green networks, and green operations.
These include “solutions to improve site energy efficiency by adopting a highly integrated design”, a simplified network architecture, and “a solution that generates and distributes optimisation policies while making energy efficiency more visualised and manageable”.
He said: “On behalf of Huawei, I would like to call on the whole industry to focus on energy efficiency and establish energy efficiency baselines and measure energy efficiency levels through a unified standard indicator system to guide the green development of the ICT industry.”
He agreed: “Of course, this requires industry organizations, standards organizations, carriers, and industry partners to form a consensus, unify the language, and take action.”
