Paolo Barbesino is Senior Advisor at Supernovae Labs. In August 2023, he visited Huawei’s Zero Carbon Showroom in Shenzhen and tells us what he saw there.
In August, I had the honor of being invited to Huawei’s Zero Carbon Showroom in Shenzhen to learn about some of their latest green and digital technologies, and how they help different industries achieve green, low-carbon business operations through digital and intelligent technologies.
As Vaclav Smil shows in his compelling book Energy and Civilization, every leap in human productivity is accompanied by a profound energy revolution. Nowadays, renewable energy technologies (e.g. wind power, solar power and energy storage) are developing rapidly. Digital and intelligent technologies such as AI and cloud are seeing constant innovations. Energy and information technologies are converging to lead mankind towards the era of clean energy with low-carbon electricity generation, electrification and efficient electricity consumption. But, as John Doerr observes, ‘speed and scale’ are needed to avoid an impending climate catastrophe.
In 2022, global greenhouse gas emissions reached 58 gigatons, the largest annual level ever recorded, as reported by the Brookings Institute, a D.C. based think tank. Calling for an ‘ecological civilization’, China has set the '30-60' goal, aiming to reach carbon emissions peak by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060. To achieve this goal, China has decided to optimize both its energy supply and consumption.
As a global leader in information technology and clean energy, Huawei integrates digital and power electronics technologies to provide safe, efficient, green and intelligent solutions for five business domains: clean power generation, energy digitalization, mobility electrification, green ICT infrastructure and integrated smart energy.
In the exhibition room, Huawei demonstrated their Smart PV solar energy solution, which consists of Core Controller, Smart Module Controller, Smart String ESS, Smart Charger and Smart PVMS (cloud). The solution provides high safety, high reliability, high productivity and easy O&M.
Today, the scale of data centers is quickly increasing, offices and industrial campus are becoming more digitized, and more frequent video conferences, mobile working and robots have become new trends. At the same time, all of these consume more power than before. Huawei told us they apply new innovative designs, simplified architecture and the latest materials to systematically optimize the energy consumption of ICT infrastructure.
In the Shenzhen campus, Huawei built an innovative all-optical green network and AI-based O&M platform, which provides better customer experience, cuts running costs, improves O&M efficiency, only requires 10 IT engineers for 20K staff, and reduces energy consumption and non-renewable resource consumption.
Carbon neutrality and intelligence have become two shared missions of the world, and they will continue to be two dominant trends in the coming decades.
