Digital Technology Enables Low Carbon Development: Huawei

Jakarta. Huawei on Tuesday said digital technology could enable low-carbon development as the Chinese tech giant sought to help the ICT industry consume less energy with green wireless sites and data centers.

“During decarbonization, digital technology is a key enabler,” Huawei’s rotating chairman Ken Hu told the hybrid 2022 Huawei Global Analyst Summit (HAS) on Tuesday.

Huawei’s strategy for reducing the ICT industry’s power consumption focuses on wireless sites and data centers. 

There are over ten million wireless sites worldwide. Ken Hu went on to say that lower energy consumption in these wireless sites can bring significant value to the ICT industry.

“At Huawei, we are using a simplified architecture design, a greater proportion of renewable energy, including solar energy, and AI [artificial intelligence] to optimize system-level energy efficiency,” Ken Hu said when explaining the company’s strategy on green wireless sites.

Replacing indoor sites with integrated outdoor cabinets can also eliminate the need for equipment rooms and air conditioners. According to Ken Hu, in Indonesia, Huawei’s simplified design solution has cut the energy consumption of supporting infrastructure by 30 percent.

Data centers consume a great deal of power.

“And there are more and more of those. To address this, we have adopted innovations and fully-equipped cooling, AI modular construction, and cluster computing, which could help us save more energy and become more environmentally friendly,” Ken Hu said.

According to Ken Hu, Huawei is also redefining the photovoltaics (PV) sector with AI, cloud, and other technologies to boost renewable energy generation. 

Ken Hu’s presentation showed that distributed systems could enable higher energy yields. Cloud and AI can significantly improve operation and maintenance (O&M) efficiency. Power line carriers can also cut down deployment costs.

“In Qinghai, we helped our customer build the world’s largest single-site solar power station with an installed capacity of 2.2 gigawatts. The [aforementioned] technologies were incorporated in the solution, increasing its energy yields by 2 percent and O&M efficiency by over 50 percent,” Ken Hu said.