Spiraling Growth 'Elephant in the Room' as Wireless Seeks More Energy Efficiency

The wireless industry needs to cut its own power consumption but can also help other industries become more energy efficient, speakers said Wednesday at the Brooklyn 6G Virtual Summit. Speakers warned that the rapid growth expected as industry moves to 6G will complicate efforts to reduce energy use.

Intelligent power can help reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions by up to 15%, said Kimberley Trommler, director of Thinknet 6G at Bayern Innovativ, funded by the Bavarian government. “Even though the mobile industry does need to reduce their emissions ... the total overall effect is still positive,” she said.

Trommler said the radio access network uses the most energy in the wireless industry. Cutting data center power use “would certainly be very welcome, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the potential with the end devices and with the RAN,” she said. Companies need to have net zero emissions by 2050, to meet current climate change goals, but only a third of wireless companies have committed to that goal, she said: “This industry still has a very long way to go.”

“The elephant in the room” is the expected growth in the amount of traffic per smartphone and the number of devices used by people and in the IoT by 2030 when industry starts rolling out 6G, Trommler said. “We are experiencing exponential growth in demand with no sign of slowing down,” she said: “The wireless industry has done an amazing job of bringing down the amount of energy required per byte, but the number of bytes is increasing exponentially. … Nature does not tolerate exponential growth for long. In living organisms, either growth slows down naturally or you end up with catastrophic system failure.”

As long as industry is having exponential growth, “that growth will eat up any gains we make in energy efficiency, preventing us from reducing total emissions,” Trommler said. The wireless industry needs the same kind of transformation the energy sector has had by embracing renewable sources, she said. “They’re doing it because both the energy sector and society have recognized that it’s a must,” she said. The wireless industry needs to have “the same very difficult conversations … on how to handle growth, on how to set priorities, … on how to finance a transition,” she said.

Addressing climate change is possible only through a more digital world, said Nishant Batra, Nokia chief strategy and technology officer. Today the world economy is only about 30% digital and “to decarbonize we need to digitalize the rest -- this is absolutely necessary when it comes to improving industrial productivity and to reduce emissions and waste,” he said.

There’s a lack of data on how much energy 5G consumes overall and which parts of the network are consuming how much energy, said Colleen Josephson, VMware senior research scientist. “Ideally, 6G will let us have that information at our fingertips,” she said: “Similar to how we track utilization and uptime, we should be building in energy and carbon consumption to the design for 6G systems.”

“This is way more than engineering,” said Ralf Bendlin, AT&T Labs principal member, technical staff. “This is a societal issue and an issue of environmental stewardship and about the future of our planet and maybe even mankind,” he said. In 2019, the world produced 54 million metric tons of electronic waste, he said. That same year, industry shipped 1.4 billion smartphones, a number that required more than 100 billion liters of water, just to mine the ore for components, he said. A typical data center uses 3 million-5 million gallons of water per day, “roughly the equivalent of a city of 30-50,000 people,” he said.

Nokia is already working on 6G with the goal of making it available commercially by 2030, Batra said. Nokia announced early this year that working with AT&T it’s developing a distributive, massive multiple-input and multiple-output system, he said: “This is an innovation that significantly increases upload capacity and speeds in 5G, and it does not require an overly complex solution.” 5G advanced will require more uplink capacity from providers and many industrial IoT applications require higher uplink speeds, he said.

“While we see 6G as a revolutionary technology, it will actually take place as an evolution in terms of network investments,” Batra said. “5G advanced will help 5G to its fullest capabilities and is an important stepping stone,” he said. Nokia is focused on the metaverse, a digital environment mimicking the real world, he said. “The metaverse is much more than social media, entertainment and gaming,” he said: “It’s about digital and physical fusion, with the human at its very center. … The metaverse will be everywhere around us.”