Green Telecom interview with Anne Larilahti, Head of Environmentally Sustainable Business, Nokia Siemens Networks

Green Telecom: What is Nokia Siemens Networks doing on the environmental front?

Anne Larilahti: We have focus on reducing the energy consumption across the mobile networks. That has been very much a focus. We have different software features and technologies helping us there. We have something called the smart radio concept that lets you reduce the number of sites. One very exciting product, I think, is multi-operator RAN, that allows operators to share networks, share their radio access equipment. Intrinsically, it tells you that it’s going to save a lot of energy and it’s going to save a lot of materials – when you build one network as opposed to every operator building their own.
That is the first thing we are looking into – the network level energy efficiency. The second is at the site level. If we look at typical indoor site, for example, 50% of the energy consumed there comes from air conditioning. That’s a huge power consumer there. What we have done there: Our equipment runs in 40 degrees, as opposed to the 25 degrees that requires air conditioning. Hopefully, you can take away the air-conditioning, or at least limit its use to a few days a year. In indoor spaces, you can basically take it (air-conditioning) out, and replace it with free air flow cooling, which doesn’t really consume anything.

So your equipment can now run at 40 degrees instead of 25 degrees?

Yes. Many of the sites today are still running at 25 degrees even if they didn’t have to. There’s the safety buffer for no particular reason. Now from the field experience, we know that we can go up to 40 (degrees) with no change in the product life time or reliability.
Then if we look at the BTS equipment itself, things can be done with software. We have a solution, for example, for shutting down some of the TRXs (transceivers) during the night when there is no heavy traffic. The site is running almost on idle, it is still looking around and when someone wants to make a call, they can make a call, but it is design for coverage at night. Only when there is a certain peak, if there is, say the Olympics in China – I expect that the night time is also going to be busy, then you have to be able to accommodate that. But during the normal night, it will run down, it will monitor the situation, if there is a sudden peak, it will raise itself up. So that would be one example of things you can do with software.
If we look at the base station and the equipment itself, our Flexi base station uses a lot less energy, so if we are looking at the Flexi today for GSM, it uses 800W, and WCDMA is 500W. Those are already pretty small numbers and we have already stated targets for 2010, of 650W for GSM and 300W for WCDMA. That’s clearly the market leading product in regards of energy efficiency. And if we look at the size and eco-efficiency, if you’ve seen one, you can see clearly the difference, where the traditional BTS is about the size of a small fridge, while the Flexi is the size of a carry-on luggage. It is something that you don’t need cranes or anything to install. You just pick it up and carry it up.
Another huge thing, environmentally there, is that you can use existing structures for mounting Flexi, so you don’t necessarily have to build a new tower. For example you can use a power tower, or a bridge, or mounted it on the wall, or a pole, so it is sort of a lighter touch on the environment in that way as well.
And there of course, there’s the material efficiency. We’ve calculated and it is about 80% smaller than a traditional BTS, so it is 80% less material, which pretty much directly translates to logistics as well, therefore, all logistics will be going down 80%, so less trucks on the road, which is always a good thing.
Those are pretty much the things that we are doing in energy efficiency in radio networks – the network level, the site level and the product level energy efficiency. You have to look at all these things to really come up with a total solution.

Has NSN done a study on the energy savings of a network build with all these energy efficiency solutions, compared to a traditional network?

Yes. Overall, if you transfer from older equipment to Flexi and deploy all the software features and so on, it will come down by 70%. We have an assumption for a large city like Beijing with about 5,000 base stations and 30 million subscribers at the moment. If all this was supported by Flexi equipment, we would save 86 GWh of electricity, which is equal to annual emissions of 25,000 cars. The CO2 number is 73 kilo tonnes.

Are you also addressing, or is there a demand, in the replacement market – for operators just looking to be more energy efficient?

Absolutely. That is why we are trying to tackle that primarily with the ambient temperature issue and the software. It’s not very environmentally friendly either if you just swap out fairly new equipment. When there is a business case for swapping in new equipment, then of course, it should be as energy efficient as possible. But it is more important in the short term to make the install base more efficient.

Is this is a growing market for NSN?

It is a growing part of the business. I think the whole environmental issue is fairly new for the operators. It is growing for environmental reasons, but also for cost reasons, because every time you save CO2, you save money as well. It’s really expensive for operators, because every time you let CO2 into the air, you have to pay for it already. That way, it is an integral part of our business as usual, in that we calculate the environmental impact along with the financial impact. These solutions offer operators a much lower operating expenditure.

From your experience with operators, is everyone looking at these issues, or is it just some operators in Europe because of carbon policies within the EU? Are you seeing the same response from operators in, say, India and China?

China certainly: It is getting very, very active on the environmental front and our customers there have high demand on us that we need to be environmentally-friendly. The energy issue in general is global because of the financial implications. You are absolutely right in that in Europe, environmental issues are rated the highest in addition to China. But for financial reasons, every operator is looking at energy efficiency right now. Diesel, and fossil fuel in general, price fluctuations are making operators’ life quite difficult because it is very hard to predict you operational expenditure because you don’t know how much energy is going to cost. So everybody is looking at it.