The ICT industry is a force for good

During Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2024, Huawei hosted a Green Development Summit, with a focus on how the information and communication technology (ICT) industry enables sustainable development – a perspective that Omdia shares. We’ve utilized our platform to highlight research by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) which estimated that for every 1kw of energy consumed by the IT sector, 10kw are saved in other sectors due to the increase in economic productivity and energy efficiency.

In this blog, we share further academic research on this topic, highlighting our view on strategies to help the ICT industry and data centers, in particular, to become greener, along with a summary of our key takeaways from the Green Development Summit. 

The efficiency gains enabled by the ICT sector  

Nearly 20 years ago, academic research started to examine the positive effects of the ICT industry when it comes to sustainable development. Most studies focus on the ways the technology industry enables increased economic productivity and makes the overall economy less energy intensive. 

• Laurence Berkeley National Laboratory found that ICT technologies could reduce the growth in carbon emissions by a third over a 10-year period.
• University of Tokyo forecasted that an ICT-based society could potentially reduce Japan’s total carbon dioxide emissions by 40% or more.
• The ACEEE found that current US energy consumption is a third of what it would have been if levels of energy efficiency and energy productivity had remained at 1970s levels (before the rise of the ICT industry).
• The Institute for Ecological Economy Research in Germany found that over the decades since 1995, economic growth, and even bigger growth in the ICT sector as the economy became more digital, has not driven an increase in energy consumption and CO2 emissions.

This quickly makes sense when we consider the amount of infrastructure needed to run all public, social, and private services face-to-face rather than virtually. In the UK today, one can renew their driving license, passport, and bank details, buy a house, and pay their taxes virtually in a matter of minutes. This reduces the number of public buildings that need to be powered, as well as the emissions produced by traveling to these buildings. It is worth noting that paper is among the most energy-intensive products to produce. Similarly, virtual meetings now provide a substitute to work-related travel. This logic is backed up by real world data. Between 2008 and 2020, over 13,000 bank branches were closed in the US as end-users turned to digital banking.

Environmental sustainability strategies and actions

The sustainability discussion in the ICT industry primarily revolves around scope 1 and scope 2 carbon emissions, which includes direct emissions from owned or controlled sources like fuel exhausts from industry vehicles and indirect emissions from purchased electricity generation. Most industry leaders have committed to using clean energy sources like wind or solar power. For example, the largest cloud service providers all claim to be using 100% renewable energy but in reality, they rely on renewable energy credits (RECs) and power purchase agreements (PPAs), in essence buying the right to claim they’re sustainable. Ultimately, all companies are dependent on the energy available from the utility grid. However, PPAs have proven to be an enabler of real investment in the buildout of renewable energy sources like windfarms and solar farms. In moving forward, the ICT industry should prioritize its focus on the following three areas. 

Energy efficiency
A first step towards improving energy efficiency is monitoring and attributing business value to energy usage so that it is accounted for in business terms. The next step is changing industrial production and data center (DC) operations to reduce electricity usage at both a physical and IT level by:

• Deploying more efficient heating and cooling systems, including exploring heat reuse strategies.
• Reducing power loss during power distribution across a site by replacing cables with busways.
• Eliminating unnecessary power conversion loss by lowering the number of times power is converted from alternate to direct current.
• Deploying IT equipment physically designed for improved power efficiency.
• Implementing IT with more efficient processors or configurations that are workload optimized.
• Maximizing the utilization of IT equipment through. 

Reuse and recycle
The concept of circular economy is about eliminating waste and enabling continual use of resources. There are some interesting existing initiatives to reuse and recycle DC gear/components, but there is also room for the industry to improve. Efficacious strategies include: 

• Deploying decommissioned servers which have not been fully amortized.
• Reusing components from decommissioned servers which have a longer useful life (i.e. power supply units).
• Maximizing the useful life memory through a tiered approach enabled by CXL connected memory pools. 

Key takeaways from the Green Development Summit

During the Green Development Summit at MWC 2024, speakers from Huawei, UNESCO, Kenya's ICT Authority, Indonesia's Bandung Institute of Technology, MTN, and international conservation and technology development agencies discussed the role the ICT industry plays in promoting green development and enabling an inclusive and sustainable digital world. 

What made the summit stand out compared to other sustainability-focused events was an emphasis on overall environmental, social and governance (ESG), not just environmental. There was a significant focus on education and the creation of equal opportunities. Guest speakers provided real life examples of initiatives in Africa with a focus on making the digital economy more accessible, including (1) over 80 digital education policies, (2) building local computing capacity. These are key to eliminating the digital divide and making the global economy less energy intensive. 

Another often overlooked topic which was key to the Green Development Summit was conservation. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) noted that the use of remote sensing, AI, machine learning and environmental DNA (eDNA) technology can help conservation agencies increase their access to data and analysis in support of conservation efforts. Huawei emphasized that technologies they developed have supported biodiversity conservation and the sustainable management of natural resources in 53 protected areas. One example was the Tech4nature Mexico project where AI models were used to identify 119 species, 34 of which are on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. To achieve this, monitoring solutions took 30,000 photos and 550,000 audio recordings, as well as extensive video footage of wild animals. 

As highlighted above, energy sourcing currently dominates the sustainability strategies and actions in the ICT industry. The discussion of environmental sustainability was in the context of efficiency at the Green Development Summit, setting the event apart. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and Huawei discussed real-time efficiency and carbon emissions monitoring as key strategies to enabling environmental sustainability. As noted above, this is often overlooked within the ICT industry. 

Bottom Line

The ICT industry is a force for good because it has a decarbonizing effect on the global economy. However, there is an urgent need to broaden the conversation and strategy scope beyond scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions, and particularly beyond the purchasing of energy (PPEs and RECs). Huawei’s Green Development Summit at MWC 2024 shed light on overlooked ESG areas, both social and environmental. At a time when investment in AI-optimized, power-hungry servers is becoming a number one priority for many data center operators, it is important that sustainability strategies become broader and more disciplined.