AT&T recently announced that it has engaged the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory for help on a climate change resiliency project to better anticipate, prepare for and adapt to the impacts of climate change. This is the first such project publicly announced in the telecommunications industry.
The partnership will bring together insights from Argonne National Laboratory’s climate and environmental science with AT&T data scientists. This has led to AT&T developing a Climate Change Analysis Tool that will help anticipate potential impacts of climate change on the company’s network infrastructure and business operations 30 years into the future.
By combining Argonne National Laboratory’s regional climate modeling data with sophisticated mapping capabilities, the tool allows AT&T to visualize climate change risk on company infrastructure and make smarter, climate-informed decisions for the future. For example, instead of relying on 10-day weather forecasts and historic events, AT&T can now visualize climate-related events, such as projected sea-level rise, surrounding copper lines, fiber cable locations, cell sites, central offices and much more decades into the future. AT&T says this information can be used to help plan for maintenance, disaster recovery and future construction to best serve its customers.
AT&T is piloting the Climate Change Analysis Tool in the Southeastern United States, which has been hit hard by severe weather and hurricanes in recent years. The company is exploring the possibility of expanding the project to include additional regions in the future. In coordination with Argonne National Laboratory, AT&T will also make the regional climate modeling data calculated by Argonne National Laboratory available to the public, including universities, municipalities and others, to use in their own climate risk analysis.
AT&T’s Climate Resiliency Project is one of the company’s energy and environmental initiatives. In December 2018, it announced it has saved close to $20 million by implementing an energy-as-a-service (EaaS) model, which allowed the company to install more energy-efficient equipment, reducing emissions from purchased electricity.
The new equipment also typically has lower maintenance requirements, thus reducing fuel use from truck trips. As of the end of 2017, the EaaS program enabled AT&T to reduce electricity consumption in 647 facilities that produced almost $20 million of annual avoided electricity utility payments, and reduced electricity usage by 183 million kilowatt hours. AT&T used Redaptive, a California-based energy equipment and solutions company, to implement the EaaS model.
And in June 2018, AT&T signed a deal with a NextEra Energy Resources subsidiary to purchase 300 megawatts of wind energy from two new wind farm projects in Wilbarger and Hardeman Counties, Texas.
The agreement builds on AT&T’s previous investments backing two wind energy centers in Webb and Duval Counties in Texas and Caddo County, Oklahoma, the telecom says. In February, the company signed agreements to purchase 520 megawatts of wind power from two NextEra Energy Resources subsidiaries: 300 MW from Next Era wind farms in Texas and 220 MW from the Minco V Wind Farm in Oklahoma.
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