Green IT resonates with employees who are concerned about global warming and environmental degradation. Martin Hingley, chief research officer at the market research firm IDC (News - Alert), said: “By deciding to become a leader in green IT, you’re tapping into a deep desire people have to change the world in a positive way.”  In addition, investors are scrutinizing their investments and choosing companies that employ sustainable practices and produce energy-efficient products.
 

As well as producing those products, e.g. smart metering solutions, Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) has embedded environmental responsibility into the way the company thinks and operates.  For example, a program that introduced 20 percent of the workspace to be shared was estimated to reduce energy use at the company’s Antwerp offices in Belgium by 11 percent.

 

Smart Metering

A smart meter (normally electrical) identifies consumption in more detail than a conventional meter and a smart metering solution communicates that information back to the local utility for monitoring and billing purposes.  The green benefit comes from the ability to give consumers detailed, near real-time information about their personal energy consumption and in turn this allows them to use electricity more efficiently and reduce their energy costs.  When widely implemented, smart meters will help reduce the load on utility providers’ networks and also enable them to react quickly to changes in consumption.

 

Smart metering is viewed by industry observers as a key technology that can help tackle some of the critical challenges in the energy sector, including capacity management, promoting more efficient use of energy and establishing better tariff models. The issue came to the fore in 2006 when the European Union issued a directive that requested that wherever possible, energy metering should be installed in households to allow self-regulation of energy consumption.

 

The Alcatel-Lucent solution is based on experience gained from working with communications service providers who handle and bill millions of calls and data connections each day. As a part of the solution, the company delivers a real-time data processing system based on its Open Service Platform, which has the field-proven ability to consolidate and process data on hundreds of millions of telephone calls. The smart metering release adapts the system to the requirements of utility providers, i.e. it counts kilowatt hours or gallons per minute instead of call minutes.

 

A nice feature is a Web interface that gives consumers information on their total power consumption and this allows utilities to help individual customers be more efficient in their energy use and to offer discounts on energy consumption that takes place outside peak usage hours.  For example, they can reduce their bills by taking simple steps such as doing laundry in the evening.

In order to facilitate implementation of smart metering the company supports different business models, e.g. Alcatel-Lucent can be a systems supplier or a network integrator that offers managed and hosted services.

Active antenna arrays

 

Active antenna arrays are a key component in the industry-wide development of energy-efficient base stations, which is the energy-intensive part of cellular networks.  Moore’s law has enabled the development of high-efficiency (>30 Percent) RF designs that allow the electronics to be on the tower instead of the ground.  This development, plus new base station architectures, cuts RF losses in the cable feeder to the antenna array by an additional 50 Percent.

 

Alcatel-Lucent’s active antenna arrays are complete RF transceivers that are integrated into each antenna element.  These elements stack to form the array: the number and their geometry depend on the required size and power output. Each element is fed with a digital RF stream, which enables independent signal transmission for each element.  By varying the number of active antenna elements and their geography, the solution can address different market segments.  One or two elements can be used for low-footprint microcells.  A vertical column of 8 or 10 elements would be used for a macrocell sector. And square or rectangular arrays could be used for advanced forms of MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output) or beam steering.