Carbon Handprint: Potential Climate Benefits of a Novel Liquid-Cooled Base Station with Waste Heat Reuse

Abstract

The novel life cycle assessment (LCA)-based carbon handprint indicator represents a potential carbon footprint reduction that producers/products create for customers who use the(ir) product instead of a baseline product. The research question is how to consider a situation in which multiple customers use a product for different purposes to provide a carbon handprint quantification and the associated communication. The study further provides new insight into the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction potential within the mobile telecommunications and energy sectors. The carbon handprint of a novel Finnish liquid-cooled base station technology is quantified. The liquid-cooled base station provides a telecommunications service and waste heat that is recoverable through the cooling liquid for heating purposes. The baseline solutions are an air-cooled base station, and district and electrical heating. The liquid-cooled base station creates a carbon handprint, both through energy savings in telecommunications and additional waste heat reuse, replacing other energy production methods. A large-scale climate change mitigation potential through a liquid-cooled base station expansion could be significant. Different supply chain operators’ contributions to the total carbon handprint could be terminologically distinguished in communications to emphasize their roles in a shared handprint. The handprint should be transparently communicated for each customer and function.

Method for Calculating the Avoided Impact of Specific Information and Communication Technology Services

“…air cooling or liquid cooling. The latter provides waste heat that is recoverable through the cooling liquid for various heating purposes [15]. The identified function is: providing cooling of base stations.…”

“…The numbers in Table 2 for power and heat are based on [15]. The most sensitive process is the most competitive in a situation with an increasing or constant market trend, while it is the least competitive in a situation with a decreasing market trend [28].…”

“…Still, existing ALCA approaches lack the identification of marginal consumers and complementary production and use. Advanced ALCA (AALCA) [2], handprint ALCA (HALCA) [15] and consequential LCA (CLCA) [16] are methodological concepts which may help articulate the calculation rationale further beyond just subtracting one ALCA from another. Nevertheless, AALCA can primarily be used [2] if the global sales of relevant sub-materials and subparts are available.…”

Reduced carbon footprints of buildings: new Finnish standards and assessments

“…Recently, methodological proposals for the use of handprint have been developed to assess how businesses contribute to United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (Kühnen et al 2019). Handprint comparisons have been carried out for products, such as diesel fuels (Grönman et al 2019) and applications, such as the cooling of telecommunication base stations (Kasurinen et al 2019). Green building certification schemes can be seen as an example of already existing socially accepted and collectively developed form of handprint schemes in the construction sector (Biemer, Dixon, & Blackburn 2013).…”

Developing the nitrogen handprint approach to quantify the positive impacts of industrial symbiosis on nitrogen cycles

“…Thus, it is a useful indicator for comparing the climate impacts of different solutions and identifying improvement potential in product systems or processes. The carbon handprint approach has been applied by, for example, Jenu et al (2020) and Kasurinen et al (2019).…”