The 2021 government work report proposed that this year, we should do a solid job of carbon peak, carbon neutral work, "14th Five-Year Plan" period, the unit of GDP energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions were reduced by 13.5%, 18%. And these two indicators will be managed as binding indicators. In the face of the hard target of low carbon, the information and communication technology (ICT) industry, which is experiencing rapid growth in energy consumption, has also proposed carbon neutral targets. Among them, Huawei proposed a "zero-carbon network" for the first time and released a digital energy zero-carbon network solution.
According to a study by McMaster University in Canada, ICT's share of global carbon emissions will rise from 1.6% in 2007 to 14% in 2040, and in 2020, data centers will account for the largest portion of the industry's carbon emissions, at 45%, followed by communications networks and terminal equipment, at 24% and 31%, respectively.
In China, as the commercial field of 5G continues to expand, 5G, the rapid expansion of the scale of data centers at the same time, the energy consumption data also climbed significantly. The 2019 report of North China Electric Power University and Greenpeace, an international environmental organization, shows that in 2018, the total electricity consumption of China's data centers was 160.9 billion kilowatt-hours, accounting for about 2% of the whole society's electricity consumption, which is more than Shanghai's whole society's electricity consumption in 2018. If China's energy structure maintains the status quo, by 2023 China's data center electricity consumption will produce 163 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions, equivalent to the carbon emission level of a medium-sized country.
Huawei's "Communications Energy Target Network White Paper" points out that although the average energy consumption of 5G networks per bit of data is only 1/10 of 4G, but because the number of 5G sites is 2-3 times that of 4G, and also has a larger traffic flow, the power consumption of a single device will be 3-3.5 times that of 4G, and the overall power consumption of the network will be more than Now double, more than 100 billion kilowatt hours per year.
In fact, the dramatic increase in ICT energy consumption is mainly due to the dramatic increase in the number of users, as well as the corresponding communications networks and terminal equipment and other new infrastructure landing and operation. Data show that 25 years ago, the global population totaled 5.6 billion, the number of mobile users less than 100 million, the number of sites is only 200,000, the number of connections is less than 0.5 billion. By 2015, the global population totaled more than 7.3 billion, mobile subscribers had surged to 4.8 billion, the number of sites exceeded 6.6 million, and the number of connections exceeded 8 billion.
Zhou Taoyuan, vice president and president of Huawei's digital energy product line, said that with the development of information technology, more and more people can enjoy the convenience of ICT infrastructure, relying on the developed network, swift network speed, people can enjoy the convenience of online office, online learning, online medical care. Behind this depends on more and more massive computing and more and more data storage to support, accompanied by the growth of energy consumption.
It is predicted that by 2025, the number of connections in the Internet of Everything smart world built by new technologies such as IoT, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, etc. will reach 100 billion. This is one of the reasons why energy consumption in the ICT industry will be so high.
How can we realize a zero-carbon network? Zhou Taoyuan said that Huawei's zero-carbon network solution includes four major solutions: minimal sites, minimal server rooms, minimal data centers, and ubiquitous green power, and then integrates a smart energy cloud.
The minimalist site refers to the extreme simplicity of the site form, from the previous indoor development to outdoor, and then further reduce its footprint. That is to say, let the house into a cabinet, cabinet into a pole, comprehensive "pole station", to achieve lower energy consumption, save electricity, save rent; minimalist machine room refers to the cabinet instead of the machine room, in order to ensure that the expansion of the case, free of additional machine room, free of change cable, free of additional air conditioning, so as to save energy, space and to avoid a large number of construction.
Zhou Taoyuan said that the minimalist data center refers to reconfiguring the architecture through full prefabrication and modular construction; reconfiguring the power supply through energy-efficient solutions to improve efficiency and achieve predictive maintenance; saving energy through solutions such as indirect evaporative cooling, which saves up to 17% compared to the traditional chilled water solution; and reconfiguring the operation and maintenance through intelligent operation and maintenance solutions to improve efficiency by 35%.
Using more green power from renewable energy sources and reducing the use of high-carbon fossil energy sources is an important step towards a zero-carbon network. Ning Jizhe, deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission, said that in 2020 China's installed renewable energy power generation has reached 934 million kilowatts, and will further expand the installed scale of renewable energy, and promote the growth and consumption of clean energy and the coordinated and orderly development of energy storage.
"Ubiquitous green power" refers to the introduction of green power into sites, server rooms, data centers, etc., to create green connectivity and green computing. Finally, these four solutions also integrate the "intelligent energy cloud", through the source-network-load-storage integration of intelligent management, and ultimately significantly reduce the cost of electricity and improve energy efficiency.
At present, in terms of energy saving and emission reduction, each operator can be said to show their skills. Some IT companies through the introduction of high-efficiency power supply, transformation of old batteries, improve energy conversion rate, reduce energy loss, to achieve the effect of power saving; some use a hybrid power supply solution to reduce the use of oil machine for power supply due to power instability associated with energy costs and energy loss.
Data centers need to maintain 24-hour uninterrupted operation. According to the "China Liquid Cooling Data Center Development White Paper" released by the National Energy Conservation Center and SEDI Consultants, the rapid development of ultra-large data centers and the rapid increase in power density put forward higher requirements for heat dissipation. 2019 traditional data centers represented by "air-cooled" technology, about 43% of its energy consumption is used for IT equipment cooling. The traditional data center represented by the "air cooling" technology, about 43% of its energy consumption is used for the cooling of IT equipment, and the energy consumption of the IT equipment itself is basically the same as 45%, to reduce the power consumption of heat dissipation, control the operating costs of the data center, and the construction of green data centers has become an urgent task.
"Liquid cooling technology is the best shortcut to break through the bottleneck of energy saving in data centers." Yao Yong, Senior Vice President of Dawning Digital Creation, said that the benefits that liquid cooling technology brings to the industry go far beyond energy saving. The efficient cooling effect of liquid-cooling technology can significantly improve the stability, efficiency and service life of servers, and at the same time enhance the density of server deployment per unit of space, highly save the space footprint, and greatly simplify the construction of ultra-large-scale data centers. Liquid-cooled data centers are ultra-low noise, environmentally friendly, and utilize waste heat to create more economic value.
According to Sadie's consultant estimates, liquid-cooled applications have a bright future, and in 2025, China's liquid-cooled data center market size will exceed 100 billion yuan.
However, for ICT, relying only on energy-saving and environmentally friendly technologies such as liquid cooling is not enough to meet the challenge of zero carbon. The introduction of green power is very critical, renewable energy so that IT companies from the energy "consumers" to become "producers" to improve the use of clean energy.
At present, the world's about 41 technology companies have set up a long-term 100% renewable energy goals, 2020, international technology giants have increased action. Amazon has acquired 35 wind power and photovoltaic power plants, becoming the largest buyer of renewable energy to date. Google has proposed that it will achieve global real-time zero-carbon operations by 2030, transitioning the zero-carbon statistic from yearly to hourly; and Microsoft has said it will achieve negative carbon emissions by 2030 and eliminate all historical corporate carbon emissions by 2050.
Tencent CEO Ma Huateng emphasized in his Circle of Friends that "the largest share of the future is expected to be the realization of native clean energy-enabled data centers. It's hard, but there's always an effort." Greenpeace's Climate and Energy Program Director, Rachel Yeh, said, "We think Ma's comments clearly send a signal that renewable energy use in data centers will be one of the most important means for the tech industry to move towards carbon neutrality."
With the development of digital technology and the pull of carbon neutrality goals, ICT technologies are constantly converging and innovating. Zhou Taoyuan said that the future direction of the mainstream program should be considered from the perspective of the end for the beginning, systematic, global energy efficiency, from the site to the server room to intelligent operation and maintenance, to achieve minimal site, minimal server room; data centers should be reconfigured from the architecture, power supply, temperature control, operation and maintenance of the four aspects, in order to improve the efficiency of operation and maintenance, reduce energy loss and shorten the construction cycle.
Wang Yi, a member of the Standing Committee of the 13th National People's Congress and vice president of the Institute of Science and Technology Strategic Consulting of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that the realization of carbon neutrality and zero-carbon, the core content is the development of renewable energy. Build a set of high proportion of renewable energy system, strengthen the top-level design, and the existing distributed energy system, smart grid, the future of smart energy, etc., as a unified system to design, reduce the cost of the system, shaping a new energy security pattern.