Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Alcatel Lucent offers green telecoms in the Baltics

Alcatel Lucent's business development manager for Nordic & Baltics, Johan Ragmo, was in Riga recently and talked about the company's energy-saving or so-called greener telecommunications solutions. These are based on, among other technologies, smart systems that draw down their electricity consumption when idle, and devices that combine several functions previously handled by different boxes into a one-box solution.
All of this sounds fine, since if thousands of companies in a country like Latvia were to cut their energy demand (and save on costs in the bargain), it would proportionately reduce the generation of ungreen energy (Latvia has lots of hydropower supplemented by some combined cycle coal and gas fueled power stations). However, the issue of the environmental impact of manufacturing processes and materials used in telco equipment remains. Why reduce energy consumption 50 % for the user if making the gadget leaves a Godzilla-sized carbon footprint. To this Johan said, off camera, that Alcatel Lucent manufactures in accordance with good industry practices. His main message was about the energy savings for business and organizational users.


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