Green Communications: Principles, Concepts and Practice

Chapter 4Embodied Energy of Communication Devices

Modeling Embodied Energy for Communication Devices

Iztok Humar¹, Xiaohu Ge², Lin Xiang², Minho Jo³, Min Chen² and Jing Zhang²

¹Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

²Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, China

³Korea University, Seoul, Korea

4.1 Introduction

During past few decades, the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has played a very important role in a modern society. However, the extensively growing numbers of users, new product and service launches as well as the rising service usage times are putting great demand on energy consumption in ICT infrastructure today.

4.1.1 Energy Consumption of ICT in Figures

From the operating point of view, approximately 600 TWh or 3% of total worldwide electrical energy is being consumed by the ICT [1, 2], causing approximately 2% of the world's emissions, and this number is even expected to grow to 1,700 TWh by the end of 2030 [3]. Telecommunication equipment (mobile, fixed, and communication devices, excluding consumer entertainment and media) currently contributes 30% to this figure or roughly 1% of the world's total electricity consumption, resulting in 30 TWh per year in United States (US) only. The major branch of this sector is mobile telephony responsible for a half of this energy consumption [2, 4]. ...