Create "Green Power", First Mention "Zero Carbon" Huawei Releases Digital Energy Zero Carbon Network Solution

Climate change is a global problem facing mankind. At the Central Economic Work Conference, which closed on February 8, 2020, "Doing a good job in peak carbon dioxide emission and carbon neutrality" was listed as one of the key tasks in 20021year. Forced by the environment, consumption upgrading and the promotion of national policies have also accelerated the transformation of the energy industry.

During the 20021MWC Shanghai Conference, Zhou Taoyuan, vice president of Huawei and president of digital energy product line, released a zero-carbon network solution for digital energy, aiming to help operators realize the zero-carbon network strategy and accelerate the global green sustainable development process.

"Zero-carbon network has become an important strategic goal of the world's leading operators." Zhou Taoyuan said that under the background of carbon neutrality, the prelude of global energy reform has been opened, and renewable energy will become a heavy role in the future energy industry. At the same time, the global ICT energy consumption continues to grow, and it is estimated that by 2030, it will reach 5% of the total global electricity consumption, and the electricity bill will account for more than 60% of the TCO of data centers in 10. Low-carbon and low-energy parallel tracks are undoubtedly the two major directions for operators to develop in the future.

Operators are caught in a "black hole" of energy consumption.

With the continuous maturity of technologies such as 5G, cloud computing, AI and big data, and the continuous prosperity of massive emerging applications, the coverage of 5G networks and the demand for data centers will explode, resulting in a surge in the number of sites and data centers. Relevant forecasts show that in 2025, the communication industry will consume 20% of the global electricity, and operators will face higher energy consumption challenges while realizing the digital transformation of the industry.

At present, energy consumption has become one of the main considerations for operators in the process of network construction. As a big consumer, about 80% of energy consumption comes from widely distributed base stations. As we all know, thousands of base stations are used in mobile communication access, and the energy consumption of base stations is mainly electric energy. With the increase of power cost and the expansion of mobile network, the electricity expenditure of base station computer room has gradually increased, and the demand of 5G base stations has doubled due to the attenuation of coverage.

At the same time, the machine rooms of mobile communication base stations are all fully enclosed, and the power supply equipment, transmitting equipment and transmission equipment in the machine rooms are all large heating elements. In order to ensure the constant temperature operation of the equipment, it will not stop because of high temperature, and the refrigeration system will continuously cool the base station, which directly leads to high power consumption.

In the total energy consumption of data centers, air conditioning and refrigeration systems are still major energy consumers. It is reported that the energy consumption of traditional air conditioning and refrigeration systems accounts for more than 28%. With the explosive growth of data traffic and computing demand, the energy consumption pressure of data center is bound to be overwhelmed. Relevant data predicts that by 2025, data center energy consumption will account for 5% of global energy consumption.

It should be pointed out that the increase in power consumption of 5G networks and data centers has also brought challenges to operator OPEX. According to Zhou Taoyuan, after joining a 5G base station, the overall OPEX has increased by 34%, a large part of which is the increase of electricity charges, so we can clearly see that our energy infrastructure is still far from the goal of carbon neutrality.

Help operators move towards "zero carbon network"

Undoubtedly, energy conservation and efficiency improvement is not only a technical problem of operators, but also the responsibility of enterprises and society. Telecom companies are also taking active actions. At present, more than 50 operators around the world have set energy conservation and emission reduction targets. At the media communication meeting, Zhou Taoyuan put forward the "zero-carbon network" for the first time, and released Huawei's digital energy zero-carbon network solution, including minimalist sites, minimalist computer rooms, minimalist data centers, ubiquitous green electricity, and smart energy clouds to help.

In terms of sites, Huawei has greatly simplified the site form, from indoor sites to outdoor sites, and further developed to outdoor blades, making rooms into cabinets and cabinets into poles, so as to reduce energy consumption and save electricity and rent.

In the construction of computer room, Huawei replaced the computer room with a cabinet for the new scene; For the expansion scenario, there is no need to increase the computer room, cable modification and air conditioning, saving energy consumption, space and engineering.

For the construction of traditional data centers, Zhou Taoyuan believes that the current data center construction mode mainly forms the whole energy facility by purchasing different components, which will inevitably lead to high energy consumption and long construction period of infrastructure.

Huawei's minimalist data center has been transformed from 20 months to 6 months through fully prefabricated and modular construction. By integrating high-density, efficient and energy-saving solutions, the power supply has been transformed to improve efficiency and achieve predictive maintenance. In refrigeration, through indirect evaporative cooling and iCooling solution, and finally through intelligent operation and maintenance solution, the operation and maintenance efficiency is improved.

"Green Power" is Huawei's intelligent optical storage solution. By introducing green power into sites, computer rooms, data centers and other scenes, the whole scene can be overlapped and the power consumption can be reduced spontaneously.

"The proposal of zero-carbon network will significantly enhance the economic value and social value of operators." Talking about the original intention of building a digital energy zero-carbon network solution, Zhou Taoyuan pointed out that Huawei's construction of a digital energy zero-carbon network solution is progressive from three levels. First, we should put an end to waste and improve energy efficiency; Secondly, operators should change from energy consumers to green energy producers; Finally, the energy infrastructure of operators will be built into a digital and intelligent energy network, and finally a zero-carbon network will be fully realized and social value will be built.

Creating "Green Power" and Accelerating the Process of Carbon Neutralization

According to the statistics of the International Energy Agency (IEA), global energy consumption has increased by more than 70% and carbon emissions have increased by nearly 80% in the past 30 years. The surge in energy consumption has aggravated the global greenhouse effect.

Zhou Taoyuan believes that there are two main driving forces in the future world, one is the global digital and intelligent transformation trend, and the other is the energy revolution with the goal of carbon neutrality, that is, from traditional fossil energy to renewable energy and green energy represented by solar photovoltaic and wind energy.

Taking the photovoltaic project of Longyang Road Base of Shanghai Metro as an example, as one of the four distributed photovoltaic projects of Shanghai Metro, Huawei's intelligent photovoltaic solution installed nearly13,000 280-watt modules by transforming the roof of the subway garage, and the generated photovoltaic power was connected to the comprehensive substation in the base for the subway to use nearby.

It is reported that the annual power generation of this photovoltaic power station is about 200,000 kilometers for a train of 8 groups of Line 2, which is equivalent to more than 1560 round trips. It is the application mode of "photovoltaic+subway", which enables green energy to empower green transportation and help Shanghai achieve the peak carbon dioxide emission target ahead of schedule.

At present, Huawei's smart photovoltaic solutions have been widely used in more than 60 countries, reducing carbon dioxide emissions10.48 billion tons, equivalent to planting more than 200 million trees. It can be seen that increasing the utilization of renewable energy, improving the efficiency and benefit of energy utilization and promoting the development of energy structure in the green direction not only play a very important role in the construction of ecological civilization, but also are major measures to deal with the energy crisis and climate change.

"It is our goal and mission to contribute to the world's carbon neutrality." As Zhou Taoyuan pointed out, Huawei's digital energy zero-carbon network solution will actively help industrial chain partners to achieve low-carbon sustainable development and accelerate the global carbon neutrality process.