Keynote Speaker

Jens Malmodin Senior Research Engineer Ericsson Mr Jens Malmodin joined Ericsson in 1995 to work with environmental issues and life cycle assessments at the radio base station basic technology research unit. Life cycle assessments and energy efficiency has always been an important part of his work and he is now very active in standardization activities. Early on, he also got the responsibility to build up Ericsson's environmental data reporting system for which he is still responsible for. Between 2003 and 2006 he changed career partly to also work with system design and energy efficiency for WCDMA radio base stations. He is currently a member of the Sustainability Research Team at Ericsson Research. Jens holds an MSc in material engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden.

Talk title: The Energy and Carbon Footprint of ICT and Media Services and Lessons Learned so far in the EARTH Project for Wireless Access Networks

Abstract: Global CO₂ emissions reached 31 000 million tons or 4.7 tons per person in 2007, mainly from fossil fuel incineration. The science is clear; CO₂ emissions need to be reduced considerably to avoid the worst effects of global warming in the future. The absolute reductions needed are in the order of -85% or a factor of about 10 per person in 2050. To reduce energy consumption and be much more energy efficient is a key. There are also other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and indirect greenhouse effects associated with food, loss of forests and the space we occupy that are even harder to reduce, equivalent to another 16 000 million tons of CO₂ equivalent emissions and effects (CO₂E). EU has already set a short term target of a 20% reduction of GHG emissions to 2020 and 30% is "offered" if other regions and countries set similar goals. Long term goals (2050) discussed is similar to what science recommends. It has become essential for society and hence for all companies to get detailed knowledge about where GHG emission occurs in order to take proper actions.

Several studies [1, 2] conclude that the ICT sector is responsible for about 2% of global CO₂ emissions with manufacturing of ICT equipment included. A new study of ICT and media [3] also calculates total CO₂ for ICT to 2% but it also calculates the share of CO₂E to about 1.5%. This study defines also a media sector that includes TV, paper media and a wide range of other electronics and this media sector has in fact a slightly larger carbon footprint than the ICT sector. Within the ICT sector, end-user equipment, first of all PCs, represent the largest share of the total energy consumption followed by all data centers and data rooms and then comes all different types of network operations. It is important to look at emissions from the whole life cycle of ICT products and systems by using life cycle assessments (LCA). A considerable share of the carbon footprint of access networks comes from infrastructure like antenna towers and ground cables.   The ICT sector is of high interest as it can enable emission reductions in other sectors. The Smart 2020 report [2] describes potential emission reductions of about 15% in 2020. At the same time, the ICT sector grows fast, especially number of end-user devices. The ratio "number of mobile subscriptions / people on Earth" is now approx. 2:3.

The ICT sector needs to show that future growth with respect to GHG emissions is sustainable. And one way to do this is to show that energy consumption and GHG emissions per user (subscription) are sustainable.  

A large telecom operator investigation was carried out for the purpose of the ICT and Media study [3]. The investigation included operators in America, Europe and Asia, corresponding to nearly 45% of telecom services revenue globally, 40% of mobile subscriptions and nearly 30% of fixed subscriptions, including broadband. The investigation covered the electricity used to run the network (the major part), but also the operator's overall energy use for buildings (offices, stores, service sites, etc.), their vehicle fleet, and several other activities. The result for annual network electricity consumption alone was:
Mobile network operations: 16 kWh (~ 2 W) / subscription
Fixed network operations: 45 kWh (~ 5 W) / subscription (PSTN, broadband and core networks)
Fixed CPE equipment: 80 kWh (~ 9 W) / broadband modem or router
Annual electricity consumption or average power consumption per subscription is one example of an energy efficiency metric for ICT.

Another type of metrics discussed are energy per GB or per Mbps (max or average). These type of metrics show a fast decrease over time, simply as a result of constantly more powerful semiconductors that allows higher data rates and in the end more data traffic. The total data traffic including voice calls (as amount of data) increased by a factor of 10 in the Swedish 3G networks from 2006 to 2009. Data alone increased by a factor >100 and now represents >90% of the total mobile traffic (as amount of data). Number of subscribers increased about 4.5 times. The increase in energy consumption has been small at the same time.  

Electricity consumption in a geographical region can be converted to CO₂ and CO₂E emissions by applying an emission factor based on the electricity production mix in that region. The world average CO2 emissions factor for electricity production/consumption is now 0.54 kg CO₂ / kWh. This figure includes only CO₂ emissions from the production itself. The corresponding CO₂E emission factor is 0.62 kg CO₂E / kWh and this figure include all GHG emissions from the whole life cycle of power plants and the grid itself, based on LCA studies.  

EARTH is an EU funded project that runs 2010-2012. The project description summary reads: "The goal of the project is to address the global environmental challenge by improving the energy efficiency of existing and future communication systems. The main focus is mobile cellular networks and their evolutions". A detailed LCA model has been constructed for all cellular communication networks globally 2007-2020 that also includes mobile phones / smartphones and mobile PCs, operator activities and the effects of more data traffic and data centers, both from an operation and manufacturing perspective. The model projects that in 2020, close to 8 billion different mobile subscriptions, on average one per every human, will have a total carbon footprint equal to 0.4% of global CO₂E [4] or twice as much as in 2010. The good news is that the carbon footprint per subscription annually is more or less the same, about 30 kg CO₂E.  

Work is now ongoing in EARTH to find good design and deployment strategies for future (cellular) communication networks and its components. One of the most promising areas is various levels of "network sleep modes" that can lower energy consumption during non peak hour traffic. Together with improvements of end-user equipment and data centers, there is a large potential to reduce the carbon footprint per subscription in the future.  

Main References:
[1] Gartner. 2007. Green IT: The new industry shockwave, presentation at symposium/ITXPO conference April 2007 San Diego.
[2] GeSI. 2008. Smart 2020: Enabling the low carbon economy in the information age. A report by The Climate Group on behalf of the Global eSustainability Initiative (GeSI)
[3] Malmodin, J., Å. Moberg, D. Lunden, G. Finnveden, N. Lovehagen. 2010. Greenhouse gas emissions and operational electricity use in the ICT and entertainment & media sectors. Journal of Industrial Ecology 2010.
[4] Fehske, A, J. Malmodin, G. Biczok, G. Fettweis. 2010. The Global Footprint of Mobile Communications - The Ecological and Economic Perspective. Submitted to IEEE Communications Magazine Feature Topic Issue on Green Communications to be published in November 2010. More information about the EARTH project: https://www.ict-earth.eu/