The global information and communication technology (ICT) sector consumed around 109 GW of electricity in 2013 – representing about 6% of the world’s total electricity consumption.

It is becoming critical to curtail power use amid a rapidly rising number of connected devices, particularly in power-constrained Africa.

Although the number of connected devices was expected to rise to between 50-billion and 70-billion over the next few decades, new research showed it was possible to rein in the power consumption of the sector by more than 90%, Alcatel-Lucent research and development arm Bell Labs Consulting senior director and partner Azfar Aslam said on Tuesday.

Speaking at the eighteenth Southern Africa Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference (Satnac), he outlined that ICT devices had consumed about 39 GW of electricity in 2013, with personal computers the largest energy consumer at 36.9 GW.

The more energy efficient smartphones and mobile phones consumed around 0.6 GW, printers 0.9 GW and tablets 0.2 GW in 2013, he told delegates attending the conference near Hermanus.

About 69 GW – equivalent to the energy consumption of 12 New York cities – was consumed by infrastructure equipment, with 37.1 GW used by the core telecommunications operational systems and the data centre equipment.

“The energy consumption of the ICT infrastructure is clearly already an issue today and an issue that will only become more important over the next decade,” a recent report by Bell, outlining a new application to determine energy use, noted.

Around 9.5 GW was used for the home and enterprise network, which encompassed consumer and enterprise networking equipment and customer premises equipment, while another 21.2 GW was consumed by the wireless and fixed-access networks.

The metropolitan, edge and core network domains gobbled up 1.6 GW of energy to provide aggregation, transport and traffic engineering for residential, business and wireless services, as well as high-performance Internet Protocol routing and optical transport for the service providers’ backbone network and Internet connections.

With billions of new devices set to enter the market, energy consumption was a particular concern for sub-Saharan Africa, which already had limited electricity generation capacity, with estimations of about 90 GW.

According to the GWATT – the Global ‘What if’ Analyzer of neTwork energy consumpTion – White Paper published by Bell, if the Internet’s energy use was measured as a country, it would rank the sixth-largest in terms of its energy demand, with the ICT sector as a whole becoming the fifth-largest energy consumer.

The rapid adoption of smartphones and tablets was driving up daily Internet traffic dramatically, with forecasts of an 85-fold increase by 2017 when compared with 2010 traffic.

By 2017, it was expected that more than five-trillion gigabytes of data would pass through the global communications network every year –the equivalent of every person on the planet issuing tweets on social media platform Twitter nonstop for more than 100 years.

Further, cloud services and applications were increasingly providing users access from any location and on any device to on-demand computing, storage and software services.

“This dramatic traffic explosion, especially from mobile devices, requires ever-increasing [energy] resources at the network infrastructure level, as well as in the [energy-hungry] data centres,” Bell commented, noting the need to support the growth in a sustainable and economically viable way.

This meant that, increasingly, telecommunication operators, service providers, content providers and equipment manufacturers, besides others, needed to start controlling and limiting the amount of operational expenditure allocated for energy consumption, Aslam said.

For emerging economies, for which universal broadband access was essential to economic growth, a particular challenge was obtaining cost-effective, reliable and stable power, Bell explained in its GWATT White Paper.

The GWATT report, which highlighted an application developed by Bell for ICT stakeholders to determine end-to-end energy consumption, showed a reliance on powering networks using costly diesel generators.

Realising this, operators were increasingly deploying hybrid or solar and wind-powered solutions for base stations and, overall, the energy efficiency of network equipment was improving 10% to 20% year-on-year, with new technologies that were more energy efficient than their predecessors reaching the market each year.

However, improvements in the solar cell efficiency, the delivery of higher-density batteries, a reduced total cost of ownership of the system and several more energy efficient network elements were required to enable a practical and economically viable large-scale deployment.

“We want to support infinite information with zero power,” Aslam said, citing the outcomes of a White Paper developed by GreenTouch, a consortium of major ICT industry players, academia and nongovernmental research experts dedicated to the energy efficiency of communications and data networks.

The GreenTouch White Paper, which had been compiled over a period of five years, showed that it was possible to cut net energy consumption in the ICT sector by 98% by 2020, when compared with 2010, with the fast-growing mobile networks, which were the most inefficient, to gain the most benefits from the energy efficiency efforts.

GreenTouch’s ‘Green Meter Research Study’, which demonstrated how new approaches, individual technologies and initiatives could improve network energy performance and energy cost, showed that mobile networks could realise potential energy efficiency improvements of up to 1 043 times.

The modelling showed potential energy efficiency improvements in fixed-access networks of 449 times and improvements in the core network of 95 times.

“This profound result demonstrates that we can support the predicted traffic growth in future networks, while at the same time significantly reducing the total energy consumption of the networks,” the consortium concluded.