China Mobile’s environmental pledge: 40% less energy per revenue unit

The world’s largest mobile operator by subscriber, China Mobile, has made the ambitious pledge of reducing its energy consumption per unit of revenue by 40% of its 2005 levels by next year, according to a report attributed to the China Daily.

The operator’s target would effectively see a 8 billion kWh reduction in energy consumption, and a reduction of 6.8 million tons of carbon emissions, the report said.

“We have already reduced electricity consumption per unit revenue by 31 percent,” Li Zhengmao, executive vice president of China Mobile, told China Business Weekly at the World Business Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen, Denmark. “We will be able to reach the 40 percent reduction target in two years.”

As part of its energy conservation initiatives, China Mobile found ways to reduce its air conditioning power consumption by as much as 50% by working with domestic air conditioning manufacturers to develop a system that cooled the equipment directly, instead of cooling the entire room where the equipment is placed, the China Daily report said.

Additional measures cited by the report included the deployment of more than 5,000 alternative energy powered base stations in remote regions such as Qinghai, Tibet and Inner Mongolia. According Li, the cost of outfitting a base station with alternative energy generation is roughly 100,000 yuan, or US$14,6000, but it is still much less than trying to bring the electrical grid to those remote locations.

“We are not using alternative energy for fashion or other reasons. It does make money for us,” he said in the report.

While Li’s statements are amiable, they are extremely ambitious – perhaps too ambitious.

According to China Mobile’s CSR performance metrics report, the operator used 9,330 GWh of energy in 2008 and had operating revenues of RMB412.4 billion, or roughly 0.023 kWh/RMB1. In 2007, those figures were 8,090 GWh and RMB369.3 billion, or about 0.022 kWh/RMB1, which actually means the ratio has been going up rather than down.

In order for China Mobile to achieve its goal, it will have to either make a lot more revenue while using the same amount of energy as today, or dramatically reduce its energy consumption in the next three years.

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Tags: alternative energy base stations, China Mobile, CO2 reduction, co2 target, CSR, Green corporations, solar, telco carbon

Category: Climate change, Featured articles, Green corporations, Mobile, Networks