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The telecommunications industry is setting light to fistfuls of tenners and causing millions of tonnes of unnecessary carbon dioxide emissions because of its arcane power transmission systems. According to Eltek Valere, a manufacturer of power systems, the world's telephone networks -- mobile and internet included -- gobble up 160 billion kWh a year. This generates 118 million tonness of CO2, or one per cent of the world's emissions.
Around two-thirds of the juice is used to power the network, and this electricity flows through an AC-to-DC converter, with a typical industry-standard efficiency of 88 to 90 per cent. Our maths pegs that at around six or seven million tonnes of CO2 emitted during the AC-to-DC conversion. Needless to say, Eltek Valere reckons it can cut this waste in half with it new über-efficient conversion systems.
AC-to-DC power conversion may not seem the sexiest topic on the green to-do list, but it is an area that data centre owners are paying close attention to. By making conversion more efficient, it could be one of the easier ways to quickly reduce energy demand and therefore overheads at a time when supply is hard to come by and prices are increasing.
Most data centres convert AC from the grid to DC in the uninterruptible power supply, which then reconverts it to AC to send to the servers, and back again into DC inside the server's transformer. To anyone not involved with running a data centre this may seem a little odd, if not confusing.
And it does indeed seem odd to BT, who reckons this three-time conversion can waste 25 to 40 per cent of the original power that comes in off the grid. It has deployed low voltage servers that take DC directly from the initial AC-to-DC conversion, cutting power consumption by 40 per cent.
Not all telcos are quite so proactive about reducing their emissions, though. Usually they're quick to preach how modern communications help companies and individuals reduce their carbon footprint by letting them chat, work and collaborate in the electronic domain rather than having to travel.
But what they don't mention is that the internet and low-cost telephone calls have laid the foundations for the last two decades of globalisation, which in turn has seen a unprecedented boom in air travel. And most don't admit how much energy is consumed by their data centres, networks and base stations.
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