At Huawei’s recent Global Analyst Summit 2022, chairman Ken Hu Keynote focused on ‘Innovating nonstop for a greener intelligent world,’ as Bill Mew reports.
Huawei has been innovating nonstop for over 30 years to create value for its customers and for society as a whole. As chairman Hu explained: “Innovation has become a core part of Huawei’s DNA. Despite considerable operational challenges over the past few years, we have continued to steadily increase our investment in R&D. For nearly a decade, our strategy has been to re-invest at least 10% of our annual revenue back into R&D. Last year, we invested 22%.”
During the event a series of Huawei executives outlined the company’s initiatives to address various industry challenges, such as bottlenecks like Shannon’s limit and von Neumann architecture which require us to explore new theories and architectures. It also focused on the company’s own priorities, including access certain advanced components, the shift in focus to systems engineering, the war for talent and the R&D drive to achieve breakthroughs in three areas: fundamental theories, software, and architecture.
In particular though Hu focused on how digital technology can enable low-carbon development, and what Huawei is doing to optimize energy supply and consumption in order to help the world go green.
Energy Supply
On the energy supply side, Huawei are working to improve the share of renewable energy in the overall energy mix. To make this happen, they are seeking to redefine PhotoVoltaic (PV) with digital technology to improve energy yields and O&M efficiency.
It is already made great progress. In 2014, Huawei became the first company to apply the concept of distributed base stations to the PV industry, which has helped solar farms increase their energy yields. It then introduced power line carrier technologies to the PV field, which can reduce deployment costs, and they are also using cloud and AI to cut O&M costs too.
For example, in Qinghai, China, it has helped build the world’s largest single-site solar power station with an installed capacity of 2.2 GW. With cloud and AI, we have increased its energy yield by more than 2% and enhanced O&M efficiency by over 50%.
Energy Consumption
On the energy consumption side, it is doing everything that it can to help industries reduce their own carbon footprints with digital technology. For example, in its own industry, it is working to reduce the environmental impact of networks. Huawei’s main focus is on mobile sites and data centers, which are the most power-hungry network components. Currently, there are about 10 million mobile sites worldwide. If Huawei can make these sites more energy efficient, it would mean a lot for the ICT industry. It is using simplified architecture design, a greater proportion of renewable energy, and AI to optimize systemlevel energy efficiency. For example, it is using simplified architecture design in Indonesia.
Huawei has replaced indoor sites with integrated outdoor cabinets, so that equipment rooms and air conditioners are no longer needed. This has cut the energy consumption of support infrastructure by about 30%. In Poland, Huawei is equipping sites with solar panels, which can now provide up to 30% of the power needed for a single site.
As data centres may be becoming ever more critical parts of our infrastructure, but they are extremely energy-intensive. To address this, Huawei has made great improvements in power consumption through new innovations in liquid cooling, AI, modular construction, and cluster computing. It has applied all of these technologies to its green data centre in Guian, and has significantly reduced its carbon footprint.
At the same time, with digitalisation and decarbonisation also presenting enormous opportunities, Huawei is seeking to capitalise on this as well. Applying its R&D and working closely with its partners and peers, it hopes to build a better and greener intelligent world.
For more information get a copy of Huawei’s Green Development 2030 Report here: