5G Can Play a Role in Reducing Environmental Harm

Even as greenhouse gas emissions keep increasing, solutions are emerging—some of the most promising of which stem from technological innovations, including burgeoning 5G.

5G is the fifth-generation standard for mobile networks, a new global wireless standard with hallmarks that include lower latency, higher bandwidth, and a greater ability to connect multiple devices. Its widespread application will enable the use of new connected technologies that, if used correctly, can help reduce energy use.

5G and the mobile industry don’t exist in a vacuum; the biggest benefits will be the advances they engender in other industries. In 2018 alone, Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA) industry research found that across fourteen markets, advances in the mobile communications industry facilitated emissions reductions in other industries by more than ten times the mobile industry’s own footprint. Ongoing advances in climate-friendly technologies can be categorized within a few key industries, including manufacturing, transportation and smart cities, and agriculture.

Manufacturing/Connected Devices

The manufacturing industry is responsible for about one-fifth of global carbon emissions. This creates the potential for outsized benefits if manufacturing can be redesigned more effectively.

Smart factories as they exist today generally place devices into one of a series of wired, self-contained networks with the few wireless devices used by unlicensed spectrum and limited to non-essential communication due to their unreliability. This setup allows for the digitization of segmented areas of the production process but hampers communication between them.

Because of these existing gaps, 5G-enabled Internet of Things (IoT)—networks of connected smart devices—can improve efficiency and productivity. Smart devices only really need a wireless connection to run, but public networks are less secure and prioritize users equally. Even the best network, when stretched among too many users with competing needs and devices, will start to show wear in speed and reliability of data transfer. Along with faster speeds, 5G allows network operators to section off a “slice” of spectrum into a manufacturer’s private network, with priority access and thus a stronger, more reliable connection. A more secure set-up limited to internal devices can, in turn, house more sensitive applications.

The advent of connected smart devices has introduced the potential for improved monitoring and decision-making capabilities throughout the production process. The industrial sector relies heavily on large machinery that is environmentally costly to make and repair. Better monitoring of equipment by dense networks of IIoT sensors can refine the equipment upkeep process and ensure that problems are brought to the fore before they become too costly or time-consuming to repair. Every piece of machinery that is maintained and not built anew is a net benefit for global emissions.

Some of these use cases are already here. In a 5G-powered smart factory in Texas, Ericsson debuted 5G-enabled devices—including 5G connected mobile robots to move products more quickly and efficiently and factory-wide 5G connectivity that enhances communication between operations segments and overall monitoring accuracy—to reduce energy use by 24 percent.

From there, all-encompassing digital representations, or “digital twins,” of manufacturing processes and facilities can be built using the comprehensive information gathered by a network of connected devices. They enable closer scrutiny of systems’ weaknesses or inefficiencies and can be used to run simulations that assess the potential impacts of a mechanical or procedural change before costly physical implementation.

Nokia has already employed some of this novel technology in a smart manufacturing factory in Oulu, Finland, including IoT AI-based analytics and a “digital twin” of operations data; this led to a 30 percent increase in operational efficiency and a 98 percent decrease in system maintenance work.

Total automation likely remains the gold standard for manufacturing efficiency with resource and waste minimization; in 2021, the automation level self-reported by manufacturing decision-makers reached 67 percent, and the majority predicted an increase of 10 percent within 10 years. Reliable wireless connectivity, which cuts down on the cost of connecting multiple cables to a factory, and instantaneous inter-device communication will be an important part of this. At the end of the manufacturing process, the widespread use of drones can decrease emissions during delivery; a single, targeted drone emits significantly fewer greenhouse gases (GHGs) than an idling delivery van.

Overall, GSMA research found that in 2018, the application of mobile technologies allowed the manufacturing sector to avoid 11 percent of emissions, a number that will likely improve as widespread adoption and fine-tuning of existing technology further cuts down on inefficiency.

Transportation/Smart Cities

Transportation accounts for 27 percent of U.S. GHG emissions, which is the largest share among U.S. economic sectors. A large proportion of those emissions comes from burning fossil fuel to power cars, trucks, and planes. The electric vehicle has long been encroaching on traditionally fossil-fuel powered territory as an environmentally friendly alternative, but more recent innovations have brought new ways to minimize emissions to the fore.

Just as the IoT can fine-tune factory production, interconnected smart devices in and around the transportation sector can cut down on emissions. 5G is transformative in this industry because safe transportation requires near real-time transmission of data. The proliferation of “edge” data centers close to the actual transport routes allows for latencies so negligible that even a moving car can respond in essentially real-time.

The advent of real-time data processing in transportation has energy saving implications. Smart parking spaces can alert vehicles when they’re empty, reducing the time (and emissions) spent searching for a spot. Smart sensors and cameras on cars and roads can help increase road safety and efficiency by broadcasting a real-time assessment of conditions and best routes. Traditional cameras play an important role in informing safe driving, but are limited by their line of sight from the vehicle. With 5G, entire sections of the city (traffic lights, other vehicles, buildings) can share a comprehensive view of real-time conditions. Ongoing, ubiquitous situational awareness that informs both smart cars and people can be used to avoid putting out more traffic into the busiest, most polluting times of day.

In Peachtree Corners, GA, an emerging 5G-powered smart city, cars communicate with smart traffic lights through a mobile app. Preemptive awareness of red or green lights streamlines the flow of traffic and allows prioritization of, for example, emergency vehicles when necessary. The benefits this type of real-time communication confers are enormous and iterative: With existing smart cities like Peachtree Corners as testing grounds, more data about real-world conditions can be collected and used to fine-tune deployments that are eventually rolled out more broadly across the country.

Within buildings, smart meters and monitoring devices can improve energy efficiency and reduce waste through, for example, water leak detection. Smart grids can also reach a new level with 5G; functions like automatic power distribution grid fault detection (wherein failures in a grid are detected and isolated to reduce the energy lost) and general data collection to streamline energy production across the grid will depend on speedy, reliable communication between a large number of devices. The network slicing that 5G allows will be a natural host for individually-controlled networks fine-tuned for different processes.

And existing means of generating clean energy can be improved; smart sensors on wind turbines, for example, can relay hundreds of thousands of data points across 5G networks to the windfarm operator to allow maximally efficient operation of the windfarm. As wind turbines move, they create a disturbance in the air that interferes with other turbines, which is why they must be placed with adequate space between one another. But the level and direction of the disturbance is affected by changing conditions like wind strength. Real-time monitoring systems can inform the optimal angle of each turbine from moment to moment, allowing windfarms to be more heavily populated with turbines while reducing interference.

Comparable monitoring systems already exist and are powered by fiber or 4G networks, but 5G is more cost-effective than fiber and transmits data at greater speed and capacity than 4G. Unlike Wi-Fi, the ability for a 5G network to be run separately from the rest of the wind farm’s network infrastructure maximizes the amount of data that can be connected from the turbines without running the risk of the entire farm’s operations shutting down. Again, the digital twins mentioned above can also be built once enough data is collected to optimize the entire setup.

Overall, 5G holds the potential to unleash an urban ecosystem that works with us, and with itself, to reduce environmental harm.

Agriculture

Agriculture is a resource-hungry, high-emission industry that contributed 11 percent of U.S. emissions in 2020. Here, the increased efficiency that smart technology brings to the table can introduce important reforms. At its core, 5G in agriculture is about smart, efficient use of materials; precision farming uses digital sensors and AI-based analytics to evaluate resource distribution and ensure economical use of pesticides, fertilizers, water, and energy.

The benefits can be observed in real-time where 5G-powered devices have already made their way into farming. In Snohomish County, WA, a field lab for 5G-powered agriculture launched by the 5G Open Innovation lab in 2021 has already begun to reap the harvests of the IoT. Applications like soil sensors measure temperature, oxygen levels, radiation, and water content, helping ensure the crops flourish. And supply chain and logistics tracking help alleviate the worst of the supply chain issues by enabling constant, comprehensive communication among every individual involved in the supply chain process.

Scalability is an important factor to consider as agriculture goes online, and the challenges grow as the opportunities do. The rural environment in which most farming takes place is more difficult and costly for ISPs to connect, but a reliable Internet connection is the backbone of the entire scheme. In addition, various conceptual approaches taken by businesses have produced incompatible technologies that will need to be standardized to enable widespread adoption of precision farming. The sheer volume of data will present challenges in its collection and interpretation. Finally, precision agriculture will need to be adopted to accommodate various approaches like vertical farming, which is the indoor cultivation of crops in vertical stacks. Smart sensors and monitoring devices will need to be adjusted for an indoor environment and integrated with climate controls to maximize the efficiency of this and other types of farming as they emerge.

But the agriculture industry’s prominence and large environmental impact leave it ripe for modernization. If 25-50 percent of farms adopted precision farming by 2030, the world could potentially see an increase in yields of 300 million tons per year, alongside a reduction in farming costs by $100 billion annually and in water use by 150 billion cubic meters annually.

Deforestation accounts for another significant chunk of GHGs, at up to 10 percent, and improved farming procedures can allay that issue by reducing the need for deforestation to create farmland. Even if legitimate deforestation can be reduced, however, illegal logging remains a serious problem, especially in preserved natural forests in Brazil, India, and Indonesia.

Here, some of the basic enhancements that 5G brings (lower latency, higher speeds, faster cloud computing) can be harnessed to create systems that simply wouldn’t work in anything less than real-time. Rainforest Connection (RFCx) is a company seeking to combat illegal logging and poaching through 5G-powered acoustic monitoring systems. The RFCx Guardian device is placed in treetops where it takes a continuous livestream recording of all sounds occurring in a forest, which is uploaded to the cloud and then analyzed by neural network models looking for specific sound signatures that indicate deforestation or poaching. The sound of a gunshot or a chainsaw, for example, precipitates a real-time alert that lets people on the ground know of the occurrence of an illegal activity and allows them stop it in real-time.

Wireless Technologies and Environmental Policy Can Go Hand in Hand

There are many potential environmentally friendly uses of 5G. Fast, comprehensive communication between the processes and machinery that make up some of our most emission-intensive sectors can go a long way in reducing emissions. We are far from the limit of the value these applications can create.

Continuing the development and deployment of wireless technologies should, therefore, be a priority for environmental policy as much as it is for telecommunications policy. Of course, the successful rollout of 5G relies on adequate spectrum allocation as well as rights of way and pole access. Dig-once policies, and other mechanisms to streamline deployment, will be critical.

But the success of 5G-powered technologies depends on more than simple selection of the best spectrum bands at the best times. The strength of use cases ultimately depends on the ubiquity of their use. Smart devices need to win society’s trust; smart cities need to prove the benefits of optimization. We also need thoughtful data policies that collect necessary information while preserving individual privacy.

To be sure, positive effects of 5G-powered technology will depend in part on their widespread adoption and intelligent use, but the first step is allowing the technologies to be developed and disseminated in the first place. Without them, we lose the potential they hold to make the world a cooler, calmer place.