Huawei is a leading global provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices. TimesTech interacted with Sarad Shrestha, Director – Sales, Huawei Telecommunications India Co. Pvt. Ltd. to know about environment protection and carbon neutrality, digital transformation, low carbon building and much more.
Read the full interview here:
TimesTech: How Huawei is contributing to environment protection and carbon neutrality?
Sarad: Huawei adheres to the green pledge of “Tech for a Better Planet” and has continuously invested in reducing carbon emissions, promoting renewable energy, contributing to a circular economy, and conserving nature with technology. As of September 30, 2021, Huawei Digital Power had helped customers generate 443.5 billion kWh of green power, save 13.6 billion kWh of electricity, and reduce carbon emissions by 210 million tons, which was equivalent to planting 290 million trees.
Today, carbon neutrality has become a shared mission of the world amidst the global climate change and technological innovation will play a central role in tackling climate change and achieving decarbonization goals. Keeping this in mind, Huawei Digital Power integrates digital and power electronics technologies, develops clean power, and enables energy digitalization to drive energy revolution for a better, greener future. Huawei focus on coverage innovation of technologies to accelerate the digitization of energy and enable various industries to reach the next level.
Huawei has leveraged combination of digital and power electronics technologies to reduce consumption during energy conversion, storage, and use, thereby improving energy efficiency. To achieve carbon neutrality, low-carbon electricity generation and electric energy consumption are a must. Huawei Digital Power works with partners to continuously innovate on energy generation and consumption to achieve green and low-carbon outcomes.
TimesTech: Elaborate on how Huawei has accelerated the growth in digital and intelligent transformation?
Sarad: In fact, the covid-19 induced pandemic accelerated the digitalization of products and services by an average of 7 years globally, with the Asia Pacific region jumping forward a remarkable 10 years. Digitalization is a game changer for society. It is bringing progressive change with technologies like AI, cloud, IoT, 5G, which is impacting individuals, families, businesses, and even societies and countries and countries at large.
Being a forerunner of technology-led transformations, Huawei has been continuously bringing in new innovative solutions, that are concentrated to serve the customers for good and enable them to extract the maximum value for their organization through their digital transformation journey. It offers intelligent solutions for their customer ranging across telecom to auto segment. The company also offers digital solutions in terms of power management, supporting the growth of a green and sustainable business. Huawei, through its digital and intelligent solutions, not only focuses to transform an organization digitally, but is also paying attention to value-driven re-construction of businesses to improve core competitiveness and sustainable development capabilities. Along with these, Huawei is also looking after the technical skills required to run a digital-based IT infrastructure. Through its various initiatives/programmes under Huawei ICT Academy, the company is also assuring that there is adequate talent developed to run and manage new-age digital solutions.
Thus, Huawei is one of the leading organizations when it comes to growth in terms of digital and intelligent transformation of itself or its customers. The company has always been at the forefront of ICT development and ensures that the sector is well equipped with intelligent technology and solutions along with the continued focus on R&D investments and preparing talent for the future.
TimesTech: How is Huawei Making low-carbon buildings and campuses a reality with its integrated smart energy solution and services?
Sarad: Huawei Digital Power works with customers and partners to build low-carbon buildings and campuses, and eventually low-carbon cities. Huawei’s integrated smart energy solutions leverage energy infrastructure such as smart PV & storage, charging networks, smart lighting, and smart cooling to achieve optimal system performance. According to the best practices, they deliver nearly 20% gain in energy efficiency, slash energy use costs by about 10%, and shorten the payback period by about 25%. In addition, Huawei has actively participated in the formulation of ultra-low-energy building standards and related policies and launched pilot projects in support of Shenzhen’s efforts to establish zones with near zero carbon footprint.
Huawei Technologies has launched its software development campus in Bengaluru which has been awarded Green Building Standard Silver Rating under the Leadership in Energy and Environment Design (LEED) by Indian Green Building Council (IGBC). This campus is fully cloud-computing based environment to reduce consumption along with solar power and natural lighting. It has rainwater harvesting, sewage treatment plant and waste management. It has eco-friendly glazing to reduce air conditioning. Huawei has kept 65% open space.
TimesTech: What is the history of Huawei’s digital power business? Can you tell us about Huawei’s R&D in the digital power domain?
Sarad: Huawei started out as a company that specialized in communications equipment, and digital power business originally focused on powering communications equipment. To meet customer’s demands for integrated energy solutions and carriers’ need for energy saving and emission reduction, Huawei called upon over the years of experience in digital and power electronics technologies to establish a Network Energy Product Line in 2011. The product line developed a range of solutions, including smart PV solutions, data center facility solutions, and site power facility solutions.
Huawei operates 12 R&D centers across the world and holds more than 1,600 patents (by the end of 2021). With approximately 6,000 employees, 60% of whom are focused on R&D, Huawei Digital Power serves one third of the world’s population across more than 170 countries and regions. Our goal is to gain a deeper understanding of industries and reduce the time required for R&D, innovation, and product development, to help our customers, address their issues and create social value.
Huawei aim to use our digital technology to promote clean energy and the digitization of traditional energy. For this purpose, Huawei established a subsidiary called Huawei Digital Power Technologies Co, with the vision of clean energy and the digitalization of traditional energy, integrated digital and power electronic technologies, and coverage information and energy flows to drive an energy revolution for a better, greener future.
TimesTech: What changes can we expect from Huawei in the energy sector and its storage aspect with its digital technologies?
Sarad: Currently, 40% of the world’s carbon emissions come from power systems. To achieve carbon neutrality faster, it will be key to build new power systems that primarily rely on renewable energy. However, renewable power sources such as solar and wind are unstable because they can be intermittent and fluctuate. With an increasing proportion of renewables in the energy mix, numerous energy storage systems must be deployed throughout the power generation, transmission, distribution, and consumption of new power systems, to function as reservoirs, regulators, and stabilizers. In a traditional energy storage system, inconsistency in lithium battery packs can result in problems such as low available capacity, short service life, and safety hazards. Huawei leverages controllable power electronics technologies to solve the uncontrollability and uncertainty of lithium batteries. The accurate cell management algorithm and distributed heat dissipation architecture are used to improve charging and discharging capacity by 15%, extending the battery lifespan by 50%. To improve safety, AI and cloud battery management system (BMS) technologies are used to predict faults in advance, reducing fire risks by more than 90%.
