World-first programme for telecom market honours Alcatel-Lucent
The European Commission has honoured Alcatel-Lucent's Alternative Energy Programme for Global Green Communications with its Sustainable Energy Europe Award 2010. The commission's competition had five categories, with a total of 272 entries and a selection of 26 finalists. Alcatel-Lucent won in the "Market Transformation — Voluntary Commitments" category.
Currently the ICT industry is responsible for about 2% of the global carbon emissions. However, as demand for ICT services and capabilities grow — in part because of the potential for ICT to enable other industries to reduce their carbon footprint — analysts project that this contribution will double to around 4% within the next 10 years. Added to which, today, more than 1 billion people do not have access to telecom services because of an energy challenge: they live in areas where there is no electricity grid, and therefore where it is extremely difficult for telecom operators to roll-out their networks.
Alcatel-Lucent's Alternative Energy Programme directly addresses these challenges by looking at the development of the first truly industrial solution of wireless telecom base stations, powered with alternative energies such as solar, wind and fuel cells. Alcatel's programme brings to market the first integrated, pre-tested, mass-produced solution that can be deployed on a massive, industrial scale — by the thousands rather than the dozens. Recently, this work was highlighted in a project done with Vodafone Qatar.
Through the Alternative Energy Programme for Global Green Communication's, Alcatel-Lucent's vision is to bridge the cultures of alternative energy and telecommunications, opening up new markets and applications for both, while creating networks that emit no carbons and are not dependent on fossil fuels. The idea is to make alternative energy "business as usual" rather than the exception in the telecommunications world. Alcatel-Lucent has already rolled out more than 350 sites powered with some form of alternative energy.
The programme aims to address a market estimated at more than 100,000 mobile base stations, which could be powered with alternative energy solutions, between 2010 and 2012, representing a yearly savings of about 7 million tons of CO2. In addition to the advanced research, Alcatel-Lucent is developing a multi-year roadmap to enable its telecom customers to benefit from the best possible alternative energy solutions as soon as the technology becomes available, while creating a new market for alternative energy systems vendors.
