5g energy base station China Dentsu

China plans to construct over 4.5 million 5G base stations in 2025 while introducing additional policy and financial incentives to support industries expected to shape the next decade, the country's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) announced during its annual work conference.

China Mobile's measurement report9 indicates that the energy consumption of a 5G base station is 4.3 kWh, which is four times that of a 4G base station at 1.1 kWh. One 5G base station is estimated to produce 30 t of carbon emissions in one year of operation10.

which is four times that of a 4G base station at 1.1 kWh. One 5G base station is estimated to produce 30 t of carbon emissions in one year of operation10. Thus, 5G networks in China are roughly estimated to produce over 60 Mt of carbon emissions annually at the national level11.

However, due to their high radio frequency and limited coverage, the construction and operation of 5G base stations can lead to significant energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. To address this challenge, scholars have focused on developing sustainable 5G base stations.

The network traffic data were collected from China Mobile. We carried out a city-level measurement in Nanchang and collected fine-grained records on the network traffic of all 4G and 5G base stations for one week in May 2022. The network traffic data cover 12,264 4G base stations and 2,159 5G base stations.

We reveal a carbon eficiency trap of 5G mobile networks leading to additional carbon emissions of 23.82 ± 1.07 Mt in China, caused by the spatiotemporal misalignment between cellular trafic and energy consumption in mobile networks.