1.
Green ICT and future
policy vision under
Horizon Europe
Svetoslav Mihaylov
Policy Officer
Smart Mobility & Living
Directorate-General Communications Networks, Content and Technology
European Commission
ICTFOOTPRINT.eu Final Event - Building an eco-friendly Green ICT
Market as the lasting legacy of ICTFOOTPRINT.eu, January 2019

2.
Political context
• Paris Agreement & EU sustainability objectives
• Strong cross-border dimension of the cloud
• Contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals
EU sustainability targets compared to 1990 levels:
2020 2030 2050
Decrease in GHG emissions 20% 40% 80-95%
(100% for
energy sector)
Renewable energy 20% 27->35% 75-97%
Improvement in Energy efficiency 20% 27->35% 41% (vs
2005-6 peak)

3.
DEI – Digital evolves with unprecedented
speed
3
Autonomous driving
Micro-electronics
Smart Energy
Digitalisation of society ICT greening other
sectors …but ICT
itself is polluting.

4.
• 2010 - European Commission mandate M/462 addressed to ESO in the
field of ICT to enable efficient energy use in fixed and mobile information
and communication networks (including Data Centers).
• Ecodesign Regulation on servers and data storage products
• Life Cycle Assessment, LCA, based methodologies developed to measure
the "Environmental impact of ICT Goods, networks, services,
Organizations, Projects and finally ICT in Cities (ITU-T L.14xx series ETSI
ES 203 199)
• European Codes of Conduct for Data Centres and broadband equipment
• Single Market for Green Products- DG ENV
• Product Environmental Footprint and Organisation Environmental
Footprint methods as a common way of measuring environmental
performance.
• Specific method for ICT only and energy/CO2e only
• Piloting for UPS and Data Storage Equipment
EC ICT Sustainability
initiatives

5.
• Energy is expensive for operators and users and its production has
environmental effects;
• Mobile traffic is increasing exponentially, and power consumption should
be adapted to the traffic load;
• For now, the main energy consumer is radio access network, but when
the number of connected devices is 10-fold (and more), their order of
magnitude becomes similar;
• In the context of EU-funded 5G RIAs, one of the KPI targets is the 90%
reduction of energy usage of 5G networks, and thus energy efficiency
improvement has been a cross-cutting 'expected impact' in various 5G
PPP topics since the past 5 years;
• There are ways to improve the EE in the future, for example with:
• Lower energy consumption when there is no traffic in the network
(elements) with help of sleep / deep sleep mode;
• Densification of networks (small cells), whereby energy consumption
is moved from the telecom equipment to baseband processing;
• Keeping information optical as long as possible
Telecom networks
5G

6.
7
https://ec.europa.eu/comm
ission/sites/beta-
political/files/budget-
may2018-horizon-europe-
decision-annexes_en.pdf
Reduced carbon
footprint of ICT
processes, covering
hardware, software,
sensors, networks,
storage and data
centres, and
including
standardised
assessments.
Operational Digital Platforms
supporting the digitalisation of
transport and energy sectors and
Green ICT.
Mission on
Carbon-Neutral
and Smart Cities
Support the
deployment of
Smart Cities (open
data platforms)

7.
Thank you for your attention!
Any questions?
svetoslav.mihaylov@ec.europa.eu

8.
• Recently voted by European Union (EU) Member
States
• It aims to reduce, in a sustainable way, the
environmental impact on these products in the
EU market
• It contains requirements (as of 03/2020) on:
• Energy Efficiency aspects
(maximum idle power consumption, minimum server efficiency in active state,
minimum efficiency of the power supply unit, information requirements on
product operating conditions and on idle power at higher temperature)
• Material efficiency aspects
(refurbishment practices, take-back schemes, design for disassembly, secure
data deletion of reusable data storage equipment, securing that firmware
updates for product are available for repairers, critical raw material information)
Ecodesign Regulation on servers and data
storage products