Ms. Chen Zhiping, Vice President and General Manager of the Branding Department at ZTE, has delivered a keynote speech entitled "A Digital Road to Carbon Neutrality", sharing how ZTE can help companies in multiple industries save energy, reduce emissions and realize society's carbon neutrality goals through ZTE's digital technology innovation.
Digital technology plays a key role in achieving the goal of carbon neutrality
Currently, carbon neutrality has become a global consensus. By June 2021, 137 countries have proposed a carbon neutralization target and more than 1,200 enterprises have committed to join SBTi, with global ICT giants taking the lead in setting strategic zero-carbon objectives. China has announced carbon emission commitments and targets.
As a driver of the digital economy, ZTE uses technological innovation to pave the green boulevard for the digital economy, and promotes the dual-carbon ambition through green operations, green supply chains, green ICT Infrastructure, and green industry.
Traditional industries are facing a greater challenge in reducing consumption. The ICT industry accounts for 2% of total carbon emissions in the world every year. With the growth of digital infrastructure deployment, ICT emission reduction also faces considerable challenges. The ITU (International Telecommunication Union) announced that the ICT industry would reduce emissions by 45% by 2030.
With accelerated digital transformation, the technologies represented by 5G, big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence have been continuously improved, and digital technologies are more widely used in all walks of life.
ZTE can improve the efficiency of resource allocation and production and life through efficient data connections, storage, calculations and applications. Many research data show that digital technology can help other industries reduce carbon emissions by more than 10 times compared to the ICT industry's carbon emissions. It can be seen that digital technology plays a key role in achieving the goal of carbon neutrality.
Setting an example, ZTE takes a green development path in digital transformation. As a positive practitioner of green development, ZTE promotes environmental protection management in office and production operations to reduce the consumption of natural resources.
Through production process optimization (high-temperature aging), annual power saving exceeds 30 million kWh. ZTE has started carbon footprint tracking management of the whole product life cycle. ZTE promotes smart air conditioners and smart lighting to reduce electricity consumption while ensuring a comfortable working environment for employees. Through green photovoltaic power generation, annual electricity output has exceeded 3 million kWh. In addition, the company works with more than 160 global environmental service providers to build a global green cycle network.
“Our carbon target also depends on the decarbonization process of upstream products and services. We are working together with upstream and downstream partners to jointly achieve energy-saving and emission reduction in material selection, material recycling, and logistics,” said Chen.
“So far, more than 40 leading suppliers have developed carbon reduction strategic plans. Most suppliers will come from partners with targeted commitments in the next 5 to 10 years. Procurement management actively promotes carbon emissions of suppliers in many ways. It continuously improves low-carbon and sustainable development competitiveness of our supply chain.”
Green digital infrastructure helps operators build low-carbon networks
For digital infrastructure, wireless sites and data centers occupy the largest proportion of energy consumption. Carbon emissions can be reduced by introducing green power, building green sites, and green data centers.
Specifically, in the process of building the energy infrastructure of the communication network, ZTE has proposed a new "zero-carbon" energy network with the concept of "green, efficient, intelligent and reliable" to increase the proportion of green energy applications.
With the annual increase of communication traffic and the large-scale deployment of 5G, the proportion of site energy consumption to the energy consumption of the whole network exceeds 45%, which is the key to reducing emissions.
As a leading ICT equipment supplier, ZTE Corporation has incorporated the concept of low-carbon and environmental protection into the design of site products and the implementation of solutions to continuously output value for the creation of green sites.
With the development of various data services and cloud services, data centers are also giants of energy consumption, including IT equipment, cooling equipment, power supply and distribution systems and lighting equipment with the IT equipment and cooling equipment alone accounting for 80% of energy consumption. Equipped with ZTE's ZEGO solution, it can solve the problem of equipment energy consumption.
At present, the UniSite, PowerPilot, and iEnergy solutions proposed by ZTE through digital practice have been widely used in the networks of global operators, helping them to achieve energy-saving and consumption reduction.
In Spain, ZTE deployed the UniSite+ solution, which is the simplest site solution in the current industry. It reduces radio units by 60% and saves power consumption by 30% compared with traditional solutions. In Malaysia, the PowerPilot AI energy-saving solution was successfully launched, saving 7 million kWh of power annually.
In partnership with its clients, ZTE has built Asia's largest micro-module intelligent data center in Shenzhen's Pingshan District, with power saving exceeding 60 million kWh each year.
Over the past two years, ZTE has been collaborating with operators and industry-leading companies to explore green and energy-saving application scenarios in various industries and extract innovative applications that can be replicated on a large scale.
Currently, ZTE and its partners continue to extensively carry out 5G+ innovative green practices, and have implemented more than 60 demonstration projects worldwide. ZTE will continue to research new energy, new materials, and new components to make breakthroughs in key technologies to help societies achieve their carbon neutralization goals.
