Applications and challenges of life cycle assessment in the context of a green sustainable telco cloud

Abstract

An LCA was conducted on a novel Telco-grade cloud technology. Server cloudification has been found to significantly reduce the environmental life cycle impacts as compared to a non-cloud situation. Improving service quality is possible without drastically increasing the life cycle impacts as compared to the non-cloud situation. In this LCA, a novel methodology was used to model electricity flows during ICT use to better reflect the temporal variation in electricity generation by utilities and electricity consumption by ICT. Nevertheless, numerous methodological challenges remain unresolved and more research is required to improve the LCA methodological framework for ICT.