Bell Labs, the research arm of network vendor Alcatel-Lucent, has unveiled ambitious plans to reduce energy consumption in the ICT space. The company is aiming to create new networking technologies that can slash consumption by a factor of 1,000 within the next five years.

The project, called Green Touch, will be driven by a consortium of companies from across the telecoms, academia and governmental industries. A selection of the 15 founder members, including China Mobile, Portugal Telecom, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology and Freescale Semiconductor, were present at the launch.

The other founding members of the consortium are: AT&T, Swisscom, Telefonica, MIT’s Research Laboratory for Electronics (RLE), Stanford University’s Wireless Systems Lab (WSL), the University of Melbourne’s Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (IBES), the CEA-LETI Applied Research Institute for Microelectronics, IMEC, and the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA).

The initiative has also been backed by the governments of the UK, US, South Korea, France and Portugal. Ed Miliband, the UK’s Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, said: “The ICT sector is perfectly placed to bring its innovative and technological forces to bear in the low carbon transition as well as in curbing its own carbon footprint. The Green Touch Initiative shows how business can play its part in delivering the low carbon society we are working to achieve.”

Introducing Green Touch, Alcatel-Lucent CEO Ben Verwaayen said: “The way people consume information has changed radically over the last few years and hundreds of millions of people come on to the communications network every year. At the same time we need to deal with global warming issues. CO2 consumption is going up and if we don’t do something radical it’ll go up even further.”

Gee Rittenhouse, the head of research at Bell Labs, echoed Verwaayen’s thoughts and added that the project has the potential to dramatically reduce the energy consumption generated by ICT. “The global network today consumes energy equivalent to emitting about 300 million tons of carbon dioxide gasses. It’s growing because of the explosion in Internet traffic. If we do nothing, it will rise significantly.”

Rittenhouse added that the solution does not lie with the technologies available today and that Green Touch was setting out on a five year journey that aims to create more energy-efficient networking equipment. “The challenge is to produce technology in five years that will lead to a 1,000 fold reduction in energy consumption. Imagine the amount of energy it takes the global network to operate for one day,” he said. “If we had this new network, that same amount of power that it takes to power one day today would represent three years of operations.”

He added that future network technology could enable a 10,000-fold reduction in ICT energy consumption, with networks that are optimised for energy efficiency as well as performance.

Funding is expected from within the industry and governments, although neither Verwaayen nor Rittenhouse would be drawn on the project’s budget or how much any new technologies may potentially cost adopters. Verwaayen added that he expects Alcatel-Lucent’s shareholders to be in favour of the project. “This is a great investment and innovation,” he said. “This is not about huge sums of money; it’s about working together with the best brains the industry can offer.”

The companies behind Green Touch will release yearly reports on the project’s achievements.