China Tower is a world-leading tower provider that builds, maintains, and operates site support infrastructure such as telecommunication towers, high-speed rail, subway systems, and large indoor distributed systems. As of June 2019, China Tower boasted a combined 1.954 million sites. In Hangzhou, the 5G Power solution deployed by China Tower and Huawei supports one cabinet for one site and boasts smart features like intelligent peak shaving, intelligent voltage boosting, and intelligent energy storage. China Tower and Huawei conducted joint pilot verification in 2018 and found that the 5G Power solution could support effective 5G site deployment without changing the grid, power distribution or cabinets. This in turn could cut retrofitting costs for a single site by more than.
[PDF Version]
Are 5G base stations causing more energy consumption?
However, Li says 5G base stations are carrying five times the traffic as when equipped with only 4G, pushing up power consumption. The carrier is seeking subsidies from the Chinese government to help with the increased energy usage.
How much power does a 5G station use?
The power consumption of a single 5G station is 2.5 to 3.5 times higher than that of a single 4G station. The main factor behind this increase in 5G power consumption is the high power usage of the active antenna unit (AAU). Under a full workload, a single station uses nearly 3700W.
Is 5G more energy efficient than 4G?
Although the absolute value of the power consumption of 5G base stations is increasing, their energy efficiency ratio is much lower than that of 4G stations. In other words, with the same power consumption, the network capacity of 5G will be as dozens of times larger than 4G, so the power consumption per bit is sharply reduced.
It also provides a way to solve the problem of 5G energy consumption. This paper puts forward a scheme to install photovoltaic energy storage system for 5G base station to reduce the power supply cost of the base station, compares it with the energy consumption cost of 5G base station in different situations, and analyzes the economy of the scheme.
Does 5G increase energy consumption?
However, this technological leap comes with a substantial increase in energy consumption. Compared to its predecessor, the fourth-generation (4G) network, the energy consumption of the 5G network is approximately three times higher .
What is a 5G base station?
A 5G base station is mainly composed of the baseband unit (BBU) and the AAU — in 4G terms, the AAU is the remote radio unit (RRU) plus antenna. The role of the BBU is to handle baseband digital signal processing, while the AAU converts the baseband digital signal into an analog signal, and then modulates it into a high-frequency radio signal.