GigaOM » power management

GreenTouch details roadmap for wiping out 90% of telecom’s energy demands

Kevin Fitchard — Tue, 14 May 2013 00:11:43 +0000

For the last 100 years, the communications industry has been focused on one goal: cramming more and more information into the same-sized pipes, whether those pipes are made of copper, optical fiber, or coaxial cable or hanging in the wireless ether. A consortium called GreenTouch, however, is betting that if the same scientific effort expended chasing each incremental increase in data efficiency could be redirected toward energy efficiency, we could nearly wipe the power footprint of our communications networks clean.

Alcatel-Lucent launched GreenTouch in 2010 with the stated goal of making wireless and wireline networks 1,000 times more energy efficient than they are today in the long term. Three years later the consortium — which has grown to include 53 vendors, carriers and research institutions — is releasing its first set of recommendations to green up the telecom industry.

The recommendations are a long list of technologies and network topologies, some of which would require mere software tweaks to current equipment while others would require new telecommunications standards and a new generation of network equipment, said Thierry Klein, GreenTouch’s technical committee chair and head of Bell Labs green research.

New small cell topologies could drastically reduce the power necessary to run mobile data networks since smaller the cell radiuses require less power necessary to maintain a connection, Klein said. Those networks would have to be managed much differently than cellular systems are today, however, with cells automatically shutting off and turning on to meet the real-time capacity demands of subscribers.

“We’re talking about adjusting the resources of the networks on the microscopic level,” Klein said. “We can create a power profile for the equipment that’s much more proportional to its use.” Basically, carriers have to commit to running only as much network as need at any given moment.

GreenTouch is also recommending infrastructure sharing, which would require operators to virtualize their own networks a common set of base stations, towers antennas and core routers. On the wireline side, GreenTouch has developed a new technique for delivering fiber connections to homes called bit-interleaved passive optical networking (BIPON), which reduces the energy required to deliver high-speed broadband by a factor of 30.

Thierry Van Landegem

GreenTouch said if fully implemented, the recommendations would meet its 1,000x improvement goal on wireless network, but would only get about halfway to the same milestone on wireline networks. But GreenTouch Chairman Thierry Van Landegem claimed that taken together these recommendations could reduce the operational energy consumption of all of today’s communications networks by a staggering 90 percent by 2020.

In an interview I pressed Van Landegem on that number, but he insisted he wasn’t talking about a 90 percent efficiency improvement but actually cutting the energy consumed by all the world’s communications networks to one tenth of 2010’s levels. That’s even accounting for the facts that many more networks will be built, billions more people will have access to those networks, and average mobile and wireline data consumption will skyrocket in 2020, Van Landegem said.

If GreenTouch can live up to that promise — and if the mobile industry follows its recommendations — such an energy reduction truly would be an impressive feat. And Van Landegem said GreenTouch is just getting started: “Reducing energy by 90 percent is conservative as we have many projects underway whose effects were not taken into account in that number.”

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Qualcomm aims at better battery life with Summit Micro buy

Kevin Fitchard — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 20:25:47 +0000

Any buyer of a new LTE smartphone will have noticed that battery life in handsets is getting worse rather than better. The increasing complexity of today’s radio technologies and mounting demands of larger screens and more powerful processors, have all conspired to make new smartphones much bigger power hogs compared to their predecessors. But Qualcomm just bought a chip company that will help it solve that problem.

The San Diego-based wireless silicon vendor on Monday said it has acquired Summit Microelectronics for an undisclosed amount. Summit makes programmable chipsets designed to optimize power performance in portable electronics and networking infrastructure.

Based out of Sunnyvale, Calif., the company was formed in 1997 and was backed by August Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, HLM Management, Norwest Venture Partners, Pequot Capital and Spinnaker Ventures. Summit has 50 employees, all of whom are joining Qualcomm’s ranks in its CDMA Technologies division, which is responsible for making the company’s core radio modems and Snapdragon application processors.

Battery technologies simply haven’t kept up with the power demands of smartphones, which has led manufacturers like Motorola and Nokia to stick larger and larger lithium-ion packs in their handsets to keep them running. Qualcomm didn’t explain exactly how it will integrate Summit’s technology into its chipsets, saying only the acquisition “enhances the competitiveness of Qualcomm’s chipset solutions and enables us to provide our customers with industry leading power management and charging performance.”

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Macworld 2010: In Closing

Weldon Dodd — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 00:00:09 +0000

In the first year that Macworld Expo San Francisco did not see Apple attend, the speculation leading up to the show was centered on what Macworld Expo would be like without its best known exhibitor. David Pogue gave us a look at the world without Apple, and then the show itself gave us a look at Macworld Expo without Apple. The results in both cases were still pretty enjoyable.

In any other year, the start of Macworld Expo would mean looking forward to a riveting Stevenote with all sorts of product announcements. This year, the Expo started with David Pogue of the New York Times leaping on stage to do his best Steve Ballmer impersonation.

The highlight of the opener was a clever and entertaining stage play of “It’s a Wonderful Mac” which riffs on the premise of “It’s a Wonderful Life” starring Jimmy Stewart by imaging what the world would be like without Apple.

The Gregory Brothers (who are actually three brothers, Andrew, Evan, Michael and Evan’s wife, Sarah) from Auto-Tune the News on YouTube nailed the parts of Old Man Potter, Uncle Billy and others while the part of George Bailey was replaced by Steve Jobs, played by LeVar Burton (Roots, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Reading Rainbow). Steve is placed into a situation where he laments that the world might be better off if he had never created Apple. “Claris” the guardian angel shows him what the world would be like — a world where DOS 27.0 is the standard and Windows was never invented because the Mac was never created for Microsoft to copy. Ultimately, a world without the graphical web browser because the concept of “clicking” on the screen was never imagined.

The stage play was clever and entertaining, and the Gregory Brothers are immensely talented and funny, but the irony of the moment was that the actual Expo gave us a real look at life without Apple. And you know what? It wasn’t that bad. Actually, it was pretty darn good.

Macworld is About Mac People

I’ve been to a few Macworld Expos (I still have my VHS of Independence Day, velcroed to the bottom of our seats at the 1997 keynote), and while I miss seeing Steve Jobs, I was really pleased at seeing the friends (both individuals and companies) that I have made over the years. I even had a chance to get accosted by some random Mac fanatics that are every bit as addled and creepy as some of the interesting folks haunting the sidewalks of downtown San Francisco. At least no one took a leak in the aisle like I saw happen on the street one day walking back from lunch.

Was It as Good for You as It Was for Me?

The value of Macworld depends a lot on who you are.

Media Types

Macworld Expo provides a great opportunity to see products, talk with vendors, and attend special briefings on upcoming products. Here at TheAppleBlog, I have several interesting bits of information to share with you over the next few weeks.

Vendors

The Expo is a chance to show off your wares to the above media types, but also a chance to interact with some of the most die-hard Mac users out there. Yes, it is only a small sampling of the Mac community, but these people care about telling you what they think of your product.

Users

The conference sessions still represent a good value because of the chance to mix and mingle with other Mac professionals. The speakers often target their talks to beginner/intermediate levels to hit a wide audience, but the guy sitting next to you could be an absolute expert on Aperture, Mac OS X Server, Photoshop, etc. If you’re not talking to people at the show, you’re missing out.

I Will Be There Next Year, Will You?

If you went to Macworld Expo last week, I would love to hear about your thoughts in the comments. Also, let us know if you plan to be there next year.

Clairvoyant, Xtreme to Convert Idle Ford Plant Into Renewable Energy Park

Jennifer Kho — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 23:00:49 +0000

An idle 320-acre Ford Motor Co. plant, which during its 52 years of operation assembled 6.6 million Lincoln Continentals, Ford Thunderbirds and other vehicles before halting operations two years ago, is getting reincarnated as a renewable energy equipment manufacturing park.

In a symbolic win for those hoping the U.S. can replace some of its thousands of lost automotive jobs with green ones, three greentech companies on Thursday announced a plan to retrofit a Ford assembly plant in Michigan (the state with the highest unemployment rate in the country) to manufacture equipment for wind and solar projects, and to set up a renewable energy training center. Along with Ford Executive Chairman Bill Ford and Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, chief executives of Xtreme Power, Clairvoyant Energy and Oerlikon Solar revealed the plan at a ceremony at the Wixom, Mich., facility.

Part of the plan involves a thin-film solar factory that solar developer Clairvoyant Energy expects to build using Oerlikon Solar equipment. The project is the first one that Switzerland-based Oerlikon has announced in the U.S., said Chris O’Brien, head of North American market development for the company. “It’s an important milestone for Oerlikon…and a vote of confidence in the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing,” he said, adding that the company believes the U.S. will become the world’s largest photovoltaic market by 2012.

Clairvoyant expects to raise financing for the project next year and to begin operations at the solar plant in 2011, he said. The factory will initially house a single 90MW production line, but could ultimately expand to four lines, O’Brien said. According to the press release, Clairvoyant plans to hire 300 employees for the factory by the end of 2011 and depending on demand, add up to 700 more.

Another project at the park will be a factory for Kyle, Texas-based Xtreme Power, which makes energy storage and power management systems for large wind and solar projects. The company plans to renovate more than 1 million square feet of the site.

Xtreme and Clairvoyant, which have agreed to buy the plant from Ford, plan to use approximately half of the 4.7 million square feet of building space for their factories and are looking for other green companies to lease the rest. In addition, the plan calls for a renewable energy research and training center for tenants and colleges.

The Michigan legislature has approved about $100 million in tax credits for the project, which is expected to cost about $725 million in total. The project is applying for additional funding from a variety of other government sources, including federal loan guarantees and manufacturing tax credits, as well as state and local tax incentives for employment and brownfield renovation projects.

All together, the renewable energy park is expected to create more than 4,000 jobs, according to a press release from Ford. That number includes jobs at the park itself and at area suppliers, but doesn’t include thousands of additional indirect jobs also expected by the groups, according to the release. The Ford plant directly employed approximately 1,000 workers when it closed in 2007, down from more than 5,000 at the height of its productivity.

Images courtesy of Ford

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