Telcos and EE: On GigaOm and the Ground

Nice article by Katie Fehrenbacher at GigaOm today titled 10 Ways Phone Companies Are Going Green, listing activities such as energy efficient networking and standardized mobile equipment chargers.

I appreciated the inclusion of energy efficient data centers and "clean power base stations" - the use of on-site generation (solar PV) for cell phone sites and the like.

In my experience working with some of the largest telcos in Northern California, I can offer just a bit of on-the-ground perspective on what progress is being made on the energy efficiency front for facilities operated by these companies.

First, like any large company, there are institutional barriers to pursuing energy efficiency upgrades. While at PG&E, I committed funding to produce investment grade energy surveys of the fifty largest facilities for one telco, with the commitment from their end that they would implement all measures that had a simple payback of two years or less after utility rebates and incentives.

Unfortunately, due to a lack of sufficient capital funding, the telco lowered that hurdle to eighteen months, and was still challenged in getting projects budgeted and completed.

So on that front, working with the telcos is no different than working with any national or global enterprise.

On the up side, telcos have great people working for them who know about energy and technology. The recommendations we made for improvements in data center operations were not only understood but embraced by the decision makers.

Lastly, the opportunities are not necessarily where you look first. One telco is replacing packaged air conditioning units on over two thousand modular cell phone sites to gain the benefit of air-side economizers - we would have missed this if we focused solely on their largest facilities.

Comments

[fcoluccio]

re: "we would have missed this if we focused solely on their largest facilities."

And so it is, too, in the enterprise, where a million (+) redundant, soon-to-be-superficial, equipment rooms, server farms and telco-LAN closets go unnoticed, but are maintained at temperatures bordering on frigid.

frank@fttx.org