Decarbonizing our
value chain
We must continually manage our industry’s own footprint. We must ensure that the products and solutions we design and deliver to our customers are as energy and material efficient as possible. Our whole value chain must also show improvements in energy efficiency and minimize any potential negative impact from technology.
Our portfolio
According to our life cycle assessment, the GHG emissions from the customer use of sold products remain the largest part of our carbon footprint. In 2024 the use phase based on GHG reporting accounted for 95% of our total GHG emissions. Our greatest efforts remain concentrated on reducing the power consumption of our products across Nokia’s portfolio to improve energy efficiency and have the greatest direct impact on our carbon footprint.
In 2024 we delivered energy-efficiency solutions in silicon, hardware, software and services. We worked with our customers to optimize the energy used across their networks, not just looking for energy gains of individual network elements. We assessed the opportunities to improve network performance and minimize energy use, thereby lowering emissions.
We also looked at automatic configuration and AI/ML based optimization of energy savings functionalities, intelligent software capabilities, technology innovations in our HW evolution, and energy-efficient site solutions to minimize our carbon footprint.
Below are a number of examples from our product offering which reflect this work across our portfolio.
5G and climate: 5G is considered natively greener than previous generations of mobile technology and can potentially provide 100 times more data traffic with less energy per bit thanks to new standardized efficiency features. This is based on the ITU-R (International Telecommunications Union) design target for 5G radios which is 100x traffic with same energy consumption compared to 4G.
5G is the only radio technology that can help to digitalize societies while also allowing the decoupling of the growth in data traffic from equivalent potential growth in energy consumption. An energy-efficient 5G deployment strategy is the only way to build the best performing, lowest cost 5G radio networks. 5G also provides the foundation for the efficient use of other new technologies (AI. VR.AR, blockchain).
About 93% of mobile radio network product life cycle emissions occur whilst in use, 7% in manufacturing, 1% in distribution, and less than 1% at the end of the life of the products. Nokia is developing solutions for all four life cycle phases to minimize the emissions. Network Modernization and 5G are key to decoupling traffic growth from energy consumption increase.
Traditionally energy efficiency software feature usage is parameterized manually with the same parameters across large radio site clusters to avoid laborious manual work.
SON energy saving modules with machine learning algorithms enable cell-specific parameterization and thanks to continuous analysis of the traffic patterns by cells, it also enables automatic re-configurations based on dynamic changes in traffic patterns. These algorithms help to reduce energy consumption further once the EE SW features are activated.
Nokia: Reduce base station energy consumption with Nokia’s SON Energy Saving Management solution
Minimizing energy waste for cooling and other auxiliary components and the reduction of idle resources are critically important levers for energy reduction. Cognitive Radio Frequency Analytics combines Nokia’s deep telco knowledge and data science capabilities with leading cloud expertise, giving tailored insights to reduce network energy consumption.
The core network has primarily implemented power saving functions provided by underlying hardware. This is changing as Nokia focuses more sharply also on the application code to help meet rising communications service provider (CSP) demands for energy efficient core solutions. To find out more, read this eBook on the subject.
Can we design AI for networks to use less energy? As it turns out, yes, there are several things we can do. These strategies include using smaller, purpose-built models, training models more efficiently, reducing the training set to only relevant data, and employing sparse, event-driven computation that mimics the functioning of the human brain.
Nokia’s digital design and optimization services do not only help achieve traditional performance KPIs, but they also help optimize radio access network energy consumption. This approach is unique in the industry. For a customer in Vietnam, we were able to decrease energy consumption by almost 14% just by adjusting radio output power on radio cell level without any performance degradation.