The energy-efficiency drive at the information factories that serve us Facebook, Google and Bitcoin. The energy-efficiency drive at the information factories that serve us Facebook, Google and Bitcoin.

How to stop data centres from gobbling up the world’s electricity

Growth in energy use has slowed owing to efficiency gains that smart policies can help maintain in the near term Data centers represent the information backbone of an increasingly digitalized world. Demand for their services has been rising rapidly (1), and data-intensive technologies such as artificial intelligence, smart and connected energy systems, distributed manufacturing systems, and autonomous vehicles promise to increase demand further (2). Given that data centers are energy-intensive enterprises, estimated to account for around 1% of worldwide electricity use, these trends have clear implications for global energy demand and must be analyzed rigorously. Several oft-cited yet simplistic analyses claim that the energy used by the world's data centers has doubled over the past decade and that their energy use will triple or even quadruple within the next decade (3–5). Such estimates contribute to a conventional wisdom (5, 6) that as demand for data center services rises rapidly, so too must their global energy use. But such extrapolations based on recent service demand growth indicators overlook strong countervailing energy efficiency trends that have occurred in parallel (see the first figure). Here, we integrate new data from different sources that have emerged recently and suggest more modest growth in global data center energy use (see the second figure). This provides policy-makers and energy analysts a recalibrated understanding of global data center energy use, its drivers, and near-term efficiency potential.

Recalibrating global data center energy-use estimates.

Assessing ICT global emissions footprint: Trends to 2040 & recommendations

Digitalization and energy consumption. Does ICT reduce energy demand

Impacts of COVID-19 on Energy Demand and Consumption: Challenges, Lessons and Emerging Opportunities

This work presents an estimation of the global electricity usage that can be ascribed to Communication Technology (CT) between 2010 and 2030. The scope is three scenarios for use and production of consumer devices, communication networks and data centers. Three different scenarios, best, expected, and worst, are set up, which include annual numbers of sold devices, data traffic and electricity intensities/efficiencies. The most significant trend, regardless of scenario, is that the proportion of use-stage electricity by consumer devices will decrease and will be transferred to the networks and data centers. Still, it seems like wireless access networks will not be the main driver for electricity use. The analysis shows that for the worst-case scenario, CT could use as much as 51% of global electricity in 2030. This will happen if not enough improvement in electricity efficiency of wireless access networks and fixed access networks/data centers is possible. However, until 2030, globally-generated renewable electricity is likely to exceed the electricity demand of all networks and data centers. Nevertheless, the present investigation suggests, for the worst-case scenario, that CT electricity usage could contribute up to 23% of the globally released greenhouse gas emissions in 2030.

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On Global Electricity Usage of Communication Technology: Trends to 2030

The traffic demand in future mobile cellular networks is expected to increase exponentially which would lead to dense base station deployment and eventually higher energy consumption. The current dominant mobile systems including GSM and UMTS were not designed with focus on energy efficiency. This paper investigates the energy saving potential of pico nodes in a heterogeneous network from an incumbent operator consideration. The results show that the number of hotspots and the user distribution in the hotspots strongly effects the power saving. Also, sleep modes in pico base stations have shown to reduce the energy loss to almost half. On a day average with limited utilization of pico base station, the heterogeneous network scenario provides marginal saving. The results also show that if the pico base station resources are fully utilized, premium user case, the heterogeneous network scenario can provide substantial reduction in energy per bit.

Energy efficiency gains through traffic offloading and traffic expansion in joint macro pico deployment

Mobile telecommunication operators are now focussing on emerging markets due to the current highly competitive mobile telecommunication sector in established markets. The deployment of wireless mobile infrastructure in these emerging markets or a green field scenario requires an innovative energy efficient approach, which is not feasible in an incumbent operator scenario. This paper describes a combined macro and pico cellular heterogeneous wireless network architecture, and analyses its energy efficiency with respect to variation in inter site distance. The increase in capacity and power saving through sparse network deployment is investigated in terms of area spectral efficiency and area power consumption respectively. The results suggest that the deployment of pico cells along with a traditional cellular network can improve the energy efficiency of the network, as well as provide gains in terms of increased inter site distance. Finally. the indifference curves of Energy Efficiency and number of pico nodes indicate the optimum deployment scheme for multiple area spectral efficiency targets.

Energy efficiency improvement through pico base stations for a green field operator

Bandwidth, network performance, QoS and network power consumption are important dilemmas of contemporary telecommunication networks. With ever increasing demand for data services, networks are destined to become denser and more power hungry, essentially increasing the capital and operational expenditure for operators around the world. One of the technological remedies to this situation is heterogeneous networks. In this work, we present a promising attribute of heterogeneous networks by offloading high QoS indoor users through femto. Additionally, we take traffic demand and sparse network deployment into consideration. The traffic demand is expressed in terms of area spectral efficiency and the power consumed in network nodes is expressed in terms of area power consumption [1]. The results suggest that with an increase in femto density the area spectral efficiency of the considered LTE network increases and decreases monotonously for sparse networks. From an operator's point of view, 100% offloading of premium users through femto is energy efficient at all area spectral efficiency targets. From an environmental perspective, 100% offloading of premium users is beneficial at low area spectral efficiency targets, while at high area spectral efficiency targets 40% offloading is energy efficient.

Energy efficient high capacity HETNET by offloading high QoS users through femto

A supplemental device for use with an automatic pin setting machine permits a player to practice on any desired spare combinations of fewer than ten pins. A control panel is mounted at the player's end of the alley, and this panel has ten keys arranged in the pattern in which the pins are set on the bowling lane. The player selects his spare combination by pushing the appropriate buttons. A control apparatus operates responsive to the player's selection to block delivery of the pins not selected to the pin-receiving magazine, and to simulate delivery of these non-selected pins to the magazine. The pin setting combination selected by the player is immediately stored in a first memory, and is transferred to a second memory for control of the pin-setting apparatus only after the pin-setting apparatus has completed its current operating cycle. In this manner, the player may program his desired pin-setting combination at any time during the course of an operation cycle of the pin-setting apparatus, but the pin-setting apparatus will act on his selection only when it is able to correctly do so.

Tomas Edler

Papers

On Global Electricity Usage of Communication Technology: Trends to 2030

Energy efficiency gains through traffic offloading and traffic expansion in joint macro pico deployment

Energy efficiency improvement through pico base stations for a green field operator

Energy efficient high capacity HETNET by offloading high QoS users through femto

Supplemental device for an automatic pin handling device