Toward Net-Zero Base Stations with Integrated and Flexible Power Supply in Future Networks

The energy consumption and carbon emissions of base stations (BSs) raise significant concerns about future network deployment. Renewable energy is thus adopted and supplied to enable the net-zero (or zero-carbon) BS. However, due to severe inconsistency between renewable energy generation and power demand, the conventional one-to-one power supply architecture could cause large waste and low utilization of renewable energy. In this article, we design a many-to-many power supply architecture for BSs to maximize the utilization of renewable energy. More specifically, we strategically group multiple renewable energy generators into virtual cells to serve multiple BSs in an integrated way, thus minimizing the inconsistency between the renewable energy generation and power demand. To finetune the power mismatch between power supply and demand in each virtual cell, we propose software-defined techniques to flexibly control the discharging/charging of a battery energy storage system. Illustrative results from a case study demonstrate that high renewable energy utilization can be achieved with the proposed architecture and mechanisms.