Abstract
This study presents operational electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions for named European telecom network operators during 2015–2018. These results are also compared to data for 2010–2015. The study provides an extensive primary data set, collected from European Telecommunication Network Operators (ETNO) members, covering operations in Europe and beyond, providing data with higher granularity than publicly available sources. The collected data set corresponds to roughly 36 percent of European subscriptions and 8 percent of global subscriptions. This data set was used to calculate the aggregated annual electricity consumption for the assessed operators, as well as associated subscription intensities, in total, for Europe and per network type. Moreover, aggregated electricity-related carbon emissions and emissions from other sources were calculated. Finally, estimates were made for the overall network operation in Europe for 2018 and 2020. The study concludes that the electricity consumption and number of subscriptions for the reporting telecom network operators remained nearly constant (+1 percent and −3 percent, respectively) between 2015 and 2018, while data traffic increased by a factor of three. For the extended period of 2010–2018, the electricity consumption per subscription remained quite stable, slightly below 30 kWh/subscription despite substantial data traffic growth (by a factor of 12).
Highlights
Compared to publicly available data from these operators, the primary data set collected for this study provides a higher granularity, which allows for exploring the detailed distribution of operational electricity and carbon emissions between fixed and mobile networks, data center operations, offices, and stores
The European Telecommunication Network Operators (ETNO) Operators’ aggregated electricity consumption, including both electricity consumed by networks and other electricity consumption, originates to a large extent from the purchase of grid electricity
For 2018, 14.5 TWh of this consumption referred to ETNO Europe, which was quite similar to the reported 14.3 TWh of the electricity consumption for 2015
Summary
Assessments of the footprint of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector are prevalent and show that it represents a relatively small share of the global electricity consumption and carbon emissions, even when including its full life cycle [1,2,3,4,5]. The ICT impact study performed by a consultant commissioned by the European Commission included a projection of the future carbon footprint based on the annual electricity use per part of the ICT sector using data from several sources [5]. In 2019, 4E TCP published a high-level model including the global energy consumption of wireless access networks based on secondary data [7]. In 2014, Van Heddegehem et al published trends in the worldwide ICT electricity consumption for 2007–2012 using data from a sample of operators worldwide [9]
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