The deep integration of digitalization and greening promotes the low-carbon development of new infrastructure

Set sail on the 14th Five-Year Plan, China's ecological civilization construction has entered a critical period from quantitative change to qualitative change.  New infrastructure is not only an important area of energy conservation and carbon reduction, but also the driving force that enables thousands of industries to achieve the goal of "double carbon". Over the years, information infrastructure has actively promoted green development, strengthened the application and promotion of green technologies, and the energy consumption per unit of information traffic has been significantly reduced. However, with the acceleration of the digital development of the economy and society, the new infrastructure has entered a period of rapid development, and its total energy consumption has increased significantly, and the green transformation is facing greater pressure. Therefore, the "14th Five-Year Plan" period to continue to promote low-carbon development is an important direction of new infrastructure construction.

I. The overall energy consumption of new infrastructure increased rapidly during the 14th Five-Year Plan period

In recent years, the field of information and communication has actively adopted advanced technologies, vigorously promoted energy conservation, emission reduction and green transformation, and the energy use efficiency of information infrastructure has continued to improve, and the green energy conservation work has achieved remarkable results. According to statistics, the electricity consumption per unit of information traffic in the communications industry has dropped from 54.4 kWh/TB in 2017 to 31.7kWh/TB in 2020, a decrease of up to 42% in three years. Among them, the energy efficiency of base stations has been greatly improved with the large-scale deployment of 5G networks and the application of related energy-saving technologies. The test results of Theil System Laboratory of China Academy of Information and Communications Technology on all mainstream base stations in the current 4G/5G live network show that the energy efficiency of 5G base stations is 12 times that of 4G base stations in the case of peak throughput. The power usage efficiency (PUE) of data centers has also continued to decline, and the PUE of advanced green data centers in the industry has been reduced to about 1.1, reaching the world's leading level.

Although the energy consumption per unit of information flow continues to decline and the related energy efficiency has been greatly improved, as people enter the rapidly developing digital society, the demand for network, computing and storage resources is growing rapidly, and the new infrastructure, especially the information infrastructure, is still facing outstanding pressure to save energy and reduce consumption during the "14th Five-Year Plan" period.

Take data centers, which are big energy users in information infrastructure. In recent years, China's data center demand has grown at an average annual rate of 30%, and the total scale of China's data center racks has exceeded 5 million. With the expansion of the scale of data centers, the overall energy consumption of data centers has maintained rapid growth. According to estimates, from 2017 to 2020, the annual power consumption of data centers above designated size in China's information and communication field will increase by 28% annually. In 2020, it will reach 57.67 billion kWh, the highest increase in recent years (see Figure 1). According to the average annual growth rate of 30% in the number of data center racks in the future, it is expected that by the end of the "14th Five-Year Plan", its annual electricity consumption will double on the basis of 2020. This poses a huge challenge to the green and low-carbon development of data centers.

For example, communication base stations are the second largest energy consumer of information infrastructure. According to the statistics of China's three major basic telecom operators, the energy consumption of China's communication network continues to grow during the "13th Five-Year Plan" period, and the power consumption of China's communication base stations will reach 46.58 billion kWh in 2020.

Especially after the commercial use of 5G in 2019, the energy consumption brought by large-scale deployment of 5G base stations has a faster growth rate, and the year-on-year growth rate in 2019 and 2020 has reached 28% and 19%, respectively (as shown in Figure 2). According to the total number of 5G base stations reached 3.72 million stations at the end of the "14th Five-Year Plan", and the power consumption of a single station was 2kW, by the end of the "14th Five-Year Plan", the annual power consumption of 5G base stations was about 81.5 billion kWh. Taking into account the further deepening of 2G/3G base station frequency reduction, energy saving and emission reduction work and the construction of 4G/5G common station sites, the total power consumption of communication base stations is expected to reach 105 billion kWh in 2025 according to the average annual energy consumption reduction rate of 5%. China Electricity Council publicly released the "China Power Industry Annual Development Report 2021" proposed that in 2025, China's whole society electricity consumption will reach 9.5 trillion kWh. According to the above data, the electricity consumption of communication base stations in 2025 accounts for about 1.1% of the total social electricity consumption.