Viewpoints
We do need more sustainability data to help decide which new networks should be built with federal money. But the US should think twice before adopting the European approach, which is motivated by a desire to keep companies honest about their own sustainability claims, and a desire to raise a non-tariff trade barrier.
By: Steven S. Ross, Broadband Communities
Sustainability – the effect of any activity on the environment – is often mentioned in the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program implementation plans filed by the states. But sustainability calculations are, at most, vaguely discussed. “Sustainability” is just a buzzword.
This contrasts with the European Union, which enacted an overly convoluted reporting scheme this January. FTTH Council for Europe, the biggest fiber broadband trade association there, estimates that communications activities – construction, maintenance, management and use – account for 3 to 4 percent of all carbon emissions among EU nations.
That seems high to me, unless one includes such non-communications or ancillary activities as giant data centers and cryptocurrency “mining” by computer. There is a consensus, for instance, that crypto mining consumes about 1 percent of all electricity, worldwide.
But the key questions remain: If robust broadband replaces commuting and in-person conferences and classes, how much energy is saved? Do we save any at all? How would we know, and is it enough to predict reduced environmental impacts to help rank-order or even control the desirability of funding proposed for new broadband deployments?
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, government and corporate leaders tend to think more in terms of resiliency rather than sustainability. How do we stay in business and go on with our lives in the next pandemic, earthquake, or other disaster? How do we protect communications assets from attack?
A little history
As fiber began to be deployed to end-users 20 years ago, those questions seemed far away and the answers seemed obvious. Fiber uses far less energy to transmit far more information than does copper. Glass fiber’s key ingredient is sand, a much more sustainable raw material than copper. Fiber is much easier to deploy – strands are very thin and very light-weight. Fiber uses little insultation compared to copper. It is more reliable and can often be customer-installed or repaired remotely from network operating centers without a truck roll.
But once network construction is completed and lower maintenance is taken into account, is that still the case? The answer back then was “yes,” but a surprisingly weak yes. FTTH Europe commissioned a detailed study from one of the few expert consultants on these matters at the time, a consulting division of PwC.
European homes are generally smaller and more energy-efficient than American homes. But homes everywhere were far less energy-efficient than typical company offices. Working from home saves the energy needed to commute, but many European commutes are short or by public transportation … and European cars consume far less gasoline than American cars. No one in Europe at the time was going to win an argument in favor of fiber, based only on sustainability.
The American Fiber to the Home Council (now the Fiber Broadband Association) did a similar study in 2008, estimating that about 10 percent of US customers with fiber broadband did significant amounts of work at home. It found a bigger energy savings than did the Europeans. But it was clear that broadband, while helpful here, was not a global-warming killer.
And then the world changed
COVID-19 was part of it. Now, Bureau of Labor Statistics data suggests that about 20 percent of American workers spend at least one or two workdays at home each week. In addition, about one out of every eight college courses are taught solely online, and many grade schools and high schools offer hybrid in-class or online learning.
American homes are becoming far more energy-efficient with regard to heating, cooling, cooking, and lighting. Conversely, over the past 20 years our private vehicles have gotten bigger, and thus less efficient, and commutes often got longer. In the 2010 census the only non-urban ZIP codes that increased population were suburbs. Thus, avoiding commutes has become more important.
We can do more from home now, thanks to broadband, and we do. Even in rural areas, many farm workers remotely monitor their tractors and other farm machinery remotely.
But don’t do what the EU is doing
All this means that the world tips even more in favor of broadband – mainly fiber, but also wireless. But do we know enough to prioritize one build over another when it comes to sustainability? About 40 percent of new housing is in multiple-dwelling-unit (MDU) buildings. More, uncounted at the national level, are new units inside large older homes or on their existing building lots. Will this situation be the same in one or two decades?
The EU’s approach is to attempt to document companies’ carbon impact in great detail. FTTH Europe has even engaged Toovalu, a sustainability consulting firm, to help broadband-related vendors and deployers do that. The cost of using the software and training a few employees is not large – about 10,000 Euros up-front and a few thousand more (depending on corporate size) annually. But the cost for a large company to collect all the data and update it regularly could be in the millions.
At the EU, under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) passed in January, many very large companies headquartered in Europe, or doing business there, are now reporting under rules of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), founded in 2021 by an American nonprofit, the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation, which is now headquartered in London. In the US, California aspires to the same approach. All European small and medium enterprises will be subject to the rules, and the costs, by 2026.
It is not enough to determine, for instance, how much fuel and other resources a company consumes. The directive must also must find out the consumption of companies that supply components. After all, one-way companies have been claiming a lower carbon footprint by buying components rather than making them. And don’t forget to determine employees’ resource consumption if they commute or work at home! Toovalu admits that, at best, only 70 percent of employees fill out the questionnaires on that. Check the employees of suppliers, and even their suppliers’ suppliers!
There is an International Organization for Standardization standard on this as well, ISO 14001.
While this detail is useful for determining if a particular company is being truthful about its sustainability claims, all industrialized nations like the US know in good detail how much energy, labor and raw materials are being used within their borders. It’s the national scorecard that counts. Each industry’s progress can be estimated roughly as well.
For our industry, credible estimates – good enough for use in BEAD award decisions, can be derived from regional workforce and industry norms. As an example, regions where the workforce is more likely to be required to be on site, such as manufacturing or health care, would be ranked slightly differently than would regions where work-at-home is more practical.
After all, collecting more sustainability data than we need to implement policy also requires more fuel, time, employees and managers … and more money … to essentially generate hot air.
