Many of South Africa’s major technology and telecom companies have plans to make their operations more environmentally friendly while increasing their resilience against load-shedding.
We asked South Africa’s largest telecoms and technology companies for more details on their green initiatives and efforts to curb load-shedding’s impact on their businesses.A Vodacom spokesperson said the operator’s biggest environmental impact and source of indirect emissions was its electricity consumption.
“This solution will allow Vodacom’s headquarters to generate around 10.8 gigawatt-hours of its own clean power every year, which is roughly 21% of the HQ’s power consumption,” Vodacom said.Vodacom said it worked with conservation agencies to better understand the role of technology in minimising biodiversity loss.
Among these, the operator plans to move its headquarters and Fairland datacentre off-grid by the end of 2023. “The plans are well advanced to procure energy from IPPs using renewable sources, and we are confident we can conclude some agreements by the end of 2022 to early 2023,” said O’Sullivan. In its fight against load-shedding, MTN has replaced close to 3,800 batteries at key sites, as continuous load-shedding had severely degraded them.Telkom told MyBroadband it had adopted a holistic approach to mitigating climate change, intending to be carbon neutral by 2035 and produce net-zero emissions by 2040.
One of the initiatives that supports this programme is the Thembani Project, in partnership with Sindawonye Recycling. He said operational expenditure on running this equipment has increased with the recent diesel price fluctuations.The other major mobile network operator in South Africa — Rain — did not provide feedback by the time of publication.