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Nokia Siemens Networks says it has the answer to mobile operators' escalating electricity bills. With a few simple measures it reckons the average €20 million annual costs for powering a mobile network could be slashed by a quarter.
According to the network communication company, this can be done by letting the indoor temperature of base stations go as high as 40 degrees Celcius, rather than cooling them down to the usual 25 degrees, according to Anne Larilahti, head of Environmental Sustainable Business at Nokia Siemens Networks. This means that air conditioning is hardly ever required, and so electricity is saved.
Larilahti also recommends a partial shutdown of equipment during the night. These combined efforts could save about 50 gigawatt hours (gWH) of electricity a year, worth roughly €6 million. This is the equivalent annual consumption of 5,000 households or 26,000 tonnes of CO2.
Nokia Siemens' main rival, Ericsson, also has a couple of ideas to green mobile networks. The first, the Ericsson Tower Tube (see main picture) combines antennae and base station equipment in single tower. There’s no intention of disguising the Tower as a tree, but according to Ericsson, because of the structure’s design, the equipment inside requires no active cooling and so uses 40 per cent of the energy of traditional base station and antennae.
For those stuck with old-school base stations, Ericsson reckons they could use 10-20 per cent less electricity by having an automatic standby installed. Surprisingly, this is not a current feature of mobile networks. Most importantly, this feature is compatible with the one million Ericsson base stations already out there on windy hills, bleak moors and inner city tower blocks.
Mobile operators must look at their network’s carbon footprint because their energy demands are likely to double in the next five years, says Actix, a developer of mobile network optimisation systems. The average mobile network creates as much CO2 as running a fleet of 120,000 cars, and accounts for 85 per cent of a mobile operators’ power bill. Already the world’s mobile operators use 61 billion kWH. Because many more people are using mobile broadband, which is more energy intensive than voice communications, mobile operators will need 124 billion kWH by 2011 unless they find ways to optimise their network energy consumption.
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