China Unicom Contributes to Green, Low-Carbon Development

China United Network Communications Group Co., Ltd. (China Unicom) has been making efforts to promote green and low-carbon development based on technology and management innovation.

Highlighting innovation in 5G technology

With high speed, outstanding reliability and low latency, 5G technology can meet the application demands of many industries. As mass construction of 5G base stations is underway, energy conservation in the stations is a concern among industrial insiders.

China Unicom joined hands with five communication device suppliers and established the first joint research center on artificial intelligence (AI) energy conservation for 5G base stations in China's communication industry. It also released a white paper on smart 5G energy conservation technology to accelerate research and commercialization of 5G energy conservation solutions.

Following the principle of green and environmental protection development, the company developed a 4G/5G collaborative intelligent energy-saving management platform to push forward green, highly-efficient and intelligent sustainable development. According to statistics from provincial pilot programs, the platform can help reduce electric charge by more than 10 percent.

China Unicom's 4G/5G collaborative intelligent energy-saving management project won champion of the 2021 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Prize in the ICT e-Environment category, the only Chinese enterprise to win the prize in the electronic environmental protection industry.

China Unicom's energy-saving project earned it a WSIS Prize. [Photo/sasac.gov.cn]

Improving power usage effectiveness (PUE)

China Unicom has highly valued ecological civilization construction by introducing new technologies and solutions based on improving PUE.

Data centers are significant power consumers. Therefore, specially-designed air conditioning and heating systems are used in different data centers to reduce power consumption.

For instance, the company used natural gas-based combined cooling, heating and power systems in its Deqing Data Center in East China's Zhejiang Province, the first distributed energy project operated by a communication operator in China.

The Belt and Road data center in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is installed with an indirect evaporative cooling water-cooled air conditioning system, which can make full use of dry air to reduce energy consumption. In the winter, technologies like graphene precision heating are used to realize accurate and timed local heating.

The Deqing Data Center in Zhejiang Province [Photo/sasac.gov.cn]

To meet demand for rapidly-developing base stations and highly-efficient and reliable operation and maintenance, China Unicom developed a smart outdoor 5G integrated equipment cabinet with low PUE and can be widely used in newly-built base stations and to replace old cabinets.

The company also created a smart dual-cycle multi-module air conditioning system, as well as cloud cabinet and liquid cooling technologies, which can provide cooling solutions for different internet data center (IDC) rooms and solve heat-release issues.

Supporting industrial transformation

Based on its core capacities of cloud computing, big data, internet of things, artificial intelligence, blockchain and security, China Unicom has made efforts to promote digitization of carbon emission, cloud management of carbon footprints and smart carbon reduction in fields of smart energy, traffic, ecology, life and industrial internet.

So far, the company has provided service to more than 140 environmental supervision departments in 25 provincial regions and is responsible for 25 smart environmental protection projects in 12 provincial regions. The projects involve online monitoring, origin analysis, trend prediction, assessment and management, and warning of carbon emissions in more than 17,000 provincial pollution-emitting enterprises. They are expected to promote green and low-carbon development in these regions.

(Executive editor: Niu Yilin)