Building Energy Efficiency Design for Telecommunication Base Stations in Guangzhou

Abstract

Telecommunication base stations (TBSs), which are the basis of the telecommunications network, consume more energy than other public buildings due to their high inner heat density and special operating schedule. The number of mobile phone users in China exceeds 500 million, and the telecommunications network has become the largest in the world, consisting of more than 100,000 TBSs. The annual energy consumption of the network is 20 billion kWh, one third of which is used by TBSs. Guangzhou, as one of the fastest developing cities in China, has more than one thousand existing TBSs and the total annual electricity bills are in the tens of millions of RMB, 25% of which is the cost of air conditioning. With the rapid growth of telecommunications, energy conservation for TBSs is gaining greater attention in China. Previous studies on energy conservation in TBSs mainly focused on improvement of efficient air-conditioning systems (Nakao et al., 1988; Maeda et al., 2005; Choi et al., 2007), indoor airflow optimization (Hayama & Nakao, 1989; Dan & Matti, 2000), use of renewable energy (Makhkamdjanov, 2006), and other energy saving and monitoring techniques (Schmidt & Shaukatullah, 2003). There are very limited studies on building energy efficiency design of TBS. Building energy efficiency design, which is known as passive cooling technology, is very popular in the traditional buildings and well inherited and applied in the modern buildings in Southern China. Compared with the active one, such as airconditioning, passive cooling technology has notable advantages on utilizing natural cooling capacities with no or few energy consumption. Many studies report building energy efficiency designs of walls, roof, glazing, shading and natural ventilation for residential buildings (Feng, 2004), institutional buildings (Athanassios et al., 2007) and high rise apartments (Cheung et al., 2005), however, no such studied were performed on TBS buildings. Nakao et al. (Nakao et al., 1988) studied a thermal control wall for TBS, which can lose heat by using a two-phase loop-type thermo-siphon system integrated inside the wall. The heat transmission coefficient of the wall was found to be one to ten times of the ordinary wall and the annual energy saving was estimated to be 20%. The study proposes a new energy efficiency design of wall for TBS, however, no other designs, such as shading or natural ventilation were mentioned. 26