Under the "double carbon" goal, the greening of new infrastructure is accelerated

At the 23rd China International Hi-Tech Fair Smart City Exhibition Area, the audience learned about Huawei Intelligent Network. Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Liang Xu

The staff inspected the computer room of China Mobile's Guizhou data center located in Gui'an New District, Guizhou. Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Ou Dongqu

In the digital era, while data centers and 5G construction are developing strongly, their high energy consumption problems are also becoming increasingly prominent. As a strategic resource and public infrastructure to support future economic and social development, data center and 5G construction are also the most critical links related to the energy conservation and consumption reduction of new infrastructure.

Especially under the "double carbon" goal, new infrastructure represented by data centers and 5G construction must become the vanguard of accelerating the greening process.

To have data, you also need an environment

Under the sweep of the digital wave, the data center has become a thriving industry. People compare its important role in today's economy and society to the "data heart" that carries the "data breathing" and "computing throughput" of the economy and society.

However, the problems it poses are also staggering. The Data Center White Paper released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology and the Open Data Center Committee shows that the overall power consumption of data centers is relatively high. At the micro level, a super-large data center consumes more than 100 million kWh of electricity per year; at the macro level, according to the article "Recalibrate the Global Data Center Energy Consumption Estimate" published in Science in early 2020, the global data center power consumption reached 1% of the total global electricity consumption in 2018.

Hu Chunchi, vice president of Huawei Digital Energy China and CEO of Huawei Data Center Energy Corps China, told reporters that from the statistics released by China, although the statistical caliber of different institutions is slightly different, the electricity consumption of the entire data center is basically about 1.5% of the electricity consumption of the whole society.

The high energy consumption of 5G construction cannot be ignored. At the "Green π" event held by Huawei, data shared by experts in the field of energy research showed that the energy consumption of a 5G base station is about 3 times that of a traditional 4G base station. At the same time, due to the shortening of the signal transmission distance, the coverage area of the base station becomes smaller, and the number of 5G base stations is about 2 times the number of 4G base stations to achieve the same coverage. According to statistics, the total electricity cost of mobile base stations of the three major operators is as high as about 20 billion yuan per year.

The data center and 5G construction will take several years to grow from high to stable. According to the "Digital Energy Target Network Helps Operators Accelerate Carbon Neutrality White Paper" released by Huawei, taking an operator as an example, according to the 5G construction plan for the next five years, it is predicted that building a site in its traditional way will bring about a 34% increase in operating costs, of which electricity costs are the main growth factor. Similarly, electricity accounts for more than 60% of the total cost of ownership in the 10-year development of the data center, becoming a key factor in the profitability of the data center.

To save energy, we must also empower

Solving the problem of high energy consumption of new infrastructure represented by data centers and 5G construction has become the direction of the government and the industry.

At present, Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and other cities have introduced low power utilization efficiency (PUE) standards to reduce data center energy consumption.

Relevant policies at the national level have been introduced. In July last year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the "Three-year Action Plan for the Development of New Data Centers (2021-2023)", proposing to deepen the green design, construction, procurement and operation management of new data centers and comprehensively improve the efficiency of resource utilization. Support the use of contract energy management and other methods to accelerate the integration and transformation of high-consumption and inefficient data centers. The new large-scale and above data centers meet the requirements of green data centers, and the green and low-carbon grades reach 4A or above.

Not long ago, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, etc. jointly issued the "Implementation Plan for Implementing the Carbon Peak Carbon Neutrality Target Requirements and Promoting the Green and High-quality Development of New Infrastructure Such as Data Centers and 5G", proposing that by 2025, data centers and 5G will basically form a green and intensive integrated operation pattern. The efficiency of data center operation power utilization and renewable energy utilization have been significantly improved, and the average power utilization efficiency of new large and super large data centers nationwide has dropped to less than 1.3, the national hub node has further decreased to less than 1.25, and the green low-carbon level has reached more than 4A level。

Duan Hao, vice president of SRAN, Huawei's wireless network product line, said that Huawei will continue to innovate in four directions: high equipment integration, site simplification, network intelligence, and full life cycle environmental protection, build a 5G all-green network, and support network energy efficiency improvement.

Technological innovation is Huawei's killer tool to cope with sustainable development demands. According to Hu Chunchi, Huawei's innovations in intelligent micro-module solutions, green solutions, power module solutions, security solutions, and digital solutions are all developing in the direction of engineering productization, product modularization, module intelligence, and low-carbon data center, with the goal of building a smarter and more low-carbon data center.

"For example, the traditional computer room in the original construction mode has high PUE and poor energy saving effect." Through our intelligent micro-module solution, the original traditional, cluttered data room can be built into an energy-saving, highly integrated design, remotely monitorable data center. Reduce the traditional CPU greater than 3.0 to less than 1.3. Hu Chunchi said. For example, smart lithium batteries are current innovation hotspots, and the lead-acid batteries used in traditional data center computer rooms are large in size, heavy in weight and short in life. We use intelligent lithium battery technology to do this system, the energy density increased by more than 3 times, occupying less than 30% of the space resources. ”

Hu Chunchi introduced that the deployment of AI technology in data centers can reduce energy consumption by about 8%. "The data center is automatically tuned by AI technology, similar to the automatic turn off of the lights when people in the office go away, and the air conditioner automatically adjusts according to the flow of people. The data center adjusts different parameters according to the external temperature and IT cooling needs to achieve more energy saving. ”

Regarding the carbon emission impact of new infrastructure construction, Chai Qimin, director of the Strategic Planning Department of the National Center for Climate Change Strategy Research and International Cooperation of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, pointed out that under the demand-driven perspective, new infrastructure construction will bring obvious consumption increase effects. From the perspective of technological innovation, the construction of new infrastructure will bring significant emission reduction benefits. Studies have shown that the energy consumption per unit data transmission of 5G technology is expected to drop to 10% to 2% of 4G, and help reduce the battery consumption of terminal devices such as smartphones and the Internet of Things.

New green infrastructure is already on the way

"We need both energy-saving new infrastructure and new infrastructure." This is the consensus of experts at the "Green π" event.

Chai Qimin believes that considering the direct and indirect effects of increasing consumption and reducing emissions, during the "14th Five-Year Plan" period, new infrastructure will increase carbon dioxide emissions by an average of about 73 million tons per year. In the long run, the superposition effect of the "double revolution" of information technology and energy technology will further appear, and the emission reduction benefits of new infrastructure on the intelligent upgrading and transformation of the industry and the coordination of green elements will be fully utilized.

According to the report of the Global Association for Mobile Communication Systems (GSMA), in Europe and North America, the contribution of mobile communication technology to social energy conservation and emission reduction reached 1:10 in 2019, which means that for every 1 kWh of electricity consumed by mobile communications, the consumption of social electricity is reduced by 10 kWh. The GSMA believes that this figure will reach 1:20 in 2025.

The data center of the Second People's Hospital of Guangdong Province adopts Huawei's new FusionModule2000 intelligent micromodule, which shortens the data center construction cycle by 50% through modular design and factory prefabrication. In addition, the PUE value has been reduced from 2.0 to less than 1.5 after the use of technologies such as iCooling. After the renovation of the data center, the daily electricity savings are equivalent to the electricity consumption of an ordinary ward for two years, and the current energy consumption of the hospital has dropped to 70% of the original.

People are pleased to find that with the implementation of new applications of green energy conservation, there are more and more examples of green technology iterations like the data center of the Second People's Hospital of Guangdong Province.

Chai Qimin said that under the "double carbon" goal, there are still many things to be done to implement the "double carbon" strategy with high quality of new infrastructure. To this end, he suggested that it is necessary to lay out the transformation strategy in advance and seize the new track of the global zero-carbon industry. Strengthen the top-level design, strengthen the green and low-carbon orientation of new infrastructure, and effectively respond to the lock-in effect of infrastructure carbon emissions and the risk of shelving assets. At the same time, it will lead the flow of capital and give play to the green and low-carbon leverage of public investment. In addition, supportive policies should be introduced, incentive plans for new green infrastructure should be implemented, and comprehensive carbon-neutral solutions for new infrastructure should be provided. (Economic Daily reporter Cao Hongyan)