Data centers and 5G networks might be hot commodities, but the infrastructure that enables them runs even hotter. Electronic equipment generates plenty of heat; the more heat energy an electronic device dissipates, the more money and energy must be spent to cool it down.
The Uptime Institute estimates that the average power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio for data centers in 2022 is 1.55. This implies that for every 1 kWh used to power data center equipment, an extra 0.55 kWh—about 35% of total power consumption—is needed to power auxiliary equipment like lighting and, more importantly, cooling. While the advent of centralized hyperscale data centers will improve energy efficiency in the coming decade, that trend is offset by the construction of many smaller local data centers on the network edge to address the exponential growth of 5G services such as the Internet of Things (IoT).
These opposing trends are one of the reasons why the Uptime Institute has only observed a marginal improvement of 10% in the average data center PUE since 2014 (which was 1.7 back then). Such a slow improvement in average data center power efficiency cannot compensate for the fast growth of new edge data centers.
For all the bad reputation data centers receive for their energy consumption, though, wireless transmission generates even more heat than wired links. While 5G standards are more energy-efficient per bit than 4G, Huawei expects that the maximum power consumption of one of their 5G base stations will be 68% higher than their 4G stations. To make things worse, the use of higher frequency spectrum bands and new IoT use cases require the deployment of more base stations too.
Prof. Earl McCune from TU Delft estimates that nine out of ten watts of electrical power in 5G systems turn into heat. This Huawei study also predicts that the energy consumption of wireless access networks will increase even more quickly than data centers in the next ten years—more than quadrupling between 2020 and 2030.
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