CLIMATE PROTECTION

The world is facing serious environmental problems, one of the most urgent ones is climate change. In the spirit of our Environmental Policy and Sustainability Strategy, we wish to contribute to the effort of resolving the challenge of climate change by decreasing the negative environmental and social effects of our operations, and by exploiting the sustainability potential inherent in ICT. Magyar Telekom’s long-term goal is to provide the electricity requiring for running its network from renewable resources to the greatest possible extent. For that purpose, the company has developed and started to apply several solutions, as well as continuously explores further possibilities.

Base stations running on hydrogen

After a long period of preparations, T‑Mobile, in cooperation with experts of US and Hungarian firms spearheading the development of the relevant technology, was one of the first in Europe to put into operation a base station running on PEM (Proton Exchange Membrane) cells, i.e. hydrogen, and is running more than ten of them by now. The significance of the development lies in the fact that by means of this state-of-the-art technology and its combination with other environment-friendly solutions, the use of green, i.e. environment-friendly base stations can become more widespread. PEM-cells can replace diesel generators, batteries and AC equipment, thus decreasing energy consumption and CO2 emissions.

Heat pumps

Magyar Telekom was the first in Hungary to introduce heat pumps that utilize technological waste heat as an alternative energy source. There are currently two facilities that use such devices. The use of such an alternative energy source has several benefits: we can minimize our dependence on external energy sources, decrease our heating-cooling costs, as well as minimize greenhouse effect and the emission of aerial contaminants by replacing fossil fuel.

What is a heat pump? It is an inventive device that runs normally as a reverse refrigerator. It picks up lower-temperature heat from the environment (water, air, soil) and technological processes, and heats (pumps) it up mechanically (using the effect that gases heat up at high pressure and cool down at low pressure). The heat thus generated may be used for heating up rooms or water. The process requires energy investment, but only a fraction of the energy produced (optimally less than 25% of that). The energy invested may come from the power mains, natural gas or some renewing energy source (mostly solar panels). The same equipment may be used in reverse for cooling.

The heat pumps used by Magyar Telekom generate more savings than the average, since they are used for cooling at the same time, as technology rooms require quite costly cooling even in wintertime due to the waste heat generated by the IT equipment there, which is then emitted to the environment. (The cooling is required to maintain the safe running temperature of the equipment.) At the same time, we usually use natural gas for heating up the rooms and water. The use of heat pumps replaces the traditional cooling equipment, and provides technological waste heat, that we had previously had to transfer by costly methods from the rooms and then dispose in the environment, to provide for heating and hot water.

Hybrid and electric cars

In the spirit of environment-conscious operations, we have added hybrid cars to our fleet. From the fall of 2007, employees may choose hybrid automobiles as benefit cars.

It makes a vital part of our Sustainability Strategy 2030 to transform out fleet so we can reduce the use of fossil fuels by 70% until the end of this decade.

Ventilation cooling of base stations

We introduced energy-efficient cooling for base stations in 2006, and use the technology since then at numerous container stations. The purpose of the technological development patented by Magyar Telekom is to radically decrease the network’s energy consumption and to improve the reliability of operations. The method is based on the principle that the AC equipment of the base stations use outside air for ventilation, which decreases their running time by 40-75% and thus generates significant energy savings. The development is described in details in our Sustainability Report 2006.