By Gary Thomas
"Mobile's Green Manifesto", a 2009 landmark report has been updated by the GSMA. This report has outlined the encouraging impacts of the operator in the carbon and energy management areas. 34 mobile networks were analyzed worldwide and it was showed that inspite of significant growth in mobile traffic and connections, there is a very slight increase in network energy consumption from 2009 to 2012.
Additionally, the analysis has confirmed that there is a decline in total energy per unit traffic by around 20% and energy per connection by 5%. It also shows that industry is advancing successfully towards reducing the emission of global greenhouse gas (GHG) per connection by 40% in 2020.
Analysis and data from the GSMA's Mobile Energy Efficiency Benchmarking (MEE) service was utilized in the report in order to compute the CO2e emissions, which result due to the diesel and electricity usage by mobile networks, and the energy costs. According to the MEE Benchmarking analysis, mobile operators can potentially save energy costs of $1 billion annually at 2010 prices, if all networks are enhanced to the industry average.
Consumer electronics, tablets, smartphones and machine-to-machine (M2M) devices are linking everything from health services to cars and also whole cities that will make positive impacts on industries. Many developments in the mobile industry have enabled reduction in energy costs and GHG emissions across various economic segments. GHG emissions can be reduced to approximately 3 Mt of CO2e per annum by enabling around 26 million global mobile M2M connections.
The accuracy of the calculated energy cost, total mobile network energy usage and CO2e emissions can be enhanced and the industry performance can be tracked using the results. Life cycle assessment of carbon and energy emissions may be included in the future development.
Source: http://www.gsma.com/