Mobile World Congress 2023: There has been a big push by mobile network operators to ensure the energy they use is directly purchased from renewable sources.
This is according to Steven Moore, head of climate action at the GSM Association (GSMA), providing an update on how the industry is progressing in its efforts to achieve its sustainability ambitions.
Moore was among the speakers at the Huawei Green ICT Development Summit, hosted on the sidelines of the MWC Barcelona 2023 mobile connectivity conference.
He explained the GSMA analysed renewable energy purchases over the last year, to determine where the mobile operators obtain energy.
The analysis showed the percentage of energy directly purchased by mobile operators from renewable sources increased from 14% a few years ago, to 24%.
“We see lots of mobile operators entering into things like power purchase agreements. For example, Verizon has been entering into many across North America, boosting the amount of renewable energy it uses.
“The other 76%, part of it is also renewable energy. There is renewable energy that is part of grid electricity in most countries. We’re actually seeing a big push for operators to directly purchase their renewable electricity.
“We’re seeing this feeding through and having an impact in terms of reducing the carbon footprint of mobile network operators, specifically their direct carbon emissions.”
According to Moore, the GSMA board made a commitment in 2019, to help the industry move to net zero carbon emissions by 2050. As a result, it set up a climate task force that has 62 mobile network operators as members.
Net zero is a systemic change that needs to happen, he explained, adding it can’t be achieved by mobile network operators alone; it has to be achieved in collaboration with governments and policymakers.
Presenting the findings of a study conducted by GSMA Intelligence, sponsored by Huawei, Moore said climate change is right at the top of the challenges that people feel is most pressing now, but they also think it’s going to be most pressing within five years.
“It even beats some of the recent challenges we’ve had around high inflation, economic instability, and the Russia and Ukraine war.”
Moore indicated companies are responding to the climate change challenge in several ways, such as switching to renewable energy, building with sustainable materials and helping customers reduce their carbon footprint.
On the climate side, energy-efficiency has become a top priority, with companies putting in a lot of work in this regard, he stated.
Moore revealed a benchmarking study was carried out this year and examined 40 global networks.
“We are seeing the core efficiency metric in this study increase from 0.24kWh per GB of data to 0.17kWh. I think this is really positive, especially because the majority of operator energy consumption happens in the radio access network.”
He concluded the GSMA is seeing positive movements by the operators towards attaining green goals.
MWC Barcelona 2023 is under way until 2 March.
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