Satellite teleports, sometimes referred to as Earth stations and the ground segment, have been connecting satellites to terrestrial networks since the mid-1970s. Since then, the market has gone through several major changes.

Players like Eutelsat, Arqiva, and Speedcast have been grappling with the shifting reality of the satellite business, aiming to remain agile while more satellites come online capable of transmitting directly to devices instead of the gateway.

“The past years have been a time of tremendous change in technology, assets in orbit, and market needs,” Robert Bell, World Teleport Association (WTA) executive director said in a 2023 report.

“Agility and the intelligent management of opportunities and risks have become key competitive advantages. Our top operators have excelled at all three.”

In 2022, Spherical Insights and Consulting estimated the global satellite ground station market to be worth $53.98 billion, which they expected to grow to $109.77 billion by 2032.

Power draw is no insignificant concern with large mechanical antennas, onsite data centers, and complex communications equipment. Teleports can house dozens of antennas, some 16 meters across or larger with motorized tracking to follow low and medium Earth orbit satellites across the sky.

“Driven primarily by these higher costs, but also by growing awareness of the consequences of fossil fuel consumption, many teleports are taking steps to decrease energy use and greenhouse gas emissions,” explains a January 2023 WTA report entitled How Green is My Teleport?

With onsite renewables, these costs can be significantly limited. Many cloud, data center, and telecommunications companies have stated sustainability goals, investing in renewable Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) and on-site microgeneration at data center and cell tower sites to meet their ESG goals. Satellite companies are slowly following suit, though recent uncertainties around the optics of ESG have seeded hesitancy in surrounding markets.

Sustainability drivers

According to the WTA, the primary motivator for new green investments was reduced energy consumption, particularly in Europe where energy prices have spiked as a result of geopolitical ructions.

A participant in the WTA’s 2023 report quoted a participant suggesting most teleports are being forced to pass on these energy costs. Another spoke of their customers requesting a more environmentally friendly standard from their teleport.

“Customers of the WTA board were asking about sustainable solutions and energy cost savings from renewables,” the WTA’s Bell tells DCD. “If you think about the power draw of a teleport, with its own small data center and massive traveling wave tube amplifiers or solid-state amplifiers, microgeneration investments can be a drop in the bucket to the energy requirements of a site.”

Bell was keen to emphasize the sharp difference between the two breeds of teleport when it came to making big investments. Some ground stations are owned by major satellite operators to verticalize their networks. Others are independent, and represent a link in the chain.

In 2019, Goonhilly described the power consumption of its own data center to be 500kW, 350kW of which was supplied by onsite solar. Some of its older dishes reportedly used up to 800W, but smaller, newer models were stated to use just 300W when stationary.

“When resources are lean, of course the first thing [teleports will] do to save energy is trim all the waste they can with new investments in technologies with lower draw and higher output,” Bell says.

Technology efficiency to reduce power needs

The WTA’s 2023 report cited widespread upscaling in high power amplifiers (HPAs), uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems, and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC), but noted that since many operators were “barely profitable,” it was important to weigh investments against cost reduction timetables. An interviewee spoke of power monitoring advances granting greater insights into inefficient hardware in server racks which informed consolidation and replacement decisions.

While heating and cooling were understood to be the primary power demand, it was followed by the demands of transmission equipment like amplifiers. Many operators aspire to update from Klystron amplifiers to Gallium Nitride (GaN) amplifiers, which have better output, meaning fewer amplifiers can do the same job.

One teleport the WTA surveyed in Germany found it could replace all of its UPS and see the investment pay for itself within 2.5 years. Others noted how cooler transmission infrastructure such as rechargeable batteries being charged while at 100 percent capacity had a knock-on effect on ventilation expense.

Processing virtualization was also highlighted as a solid method of energy mitigation, with one participant claiming replacing five to 15 racks with cloud support would save $17,000 a year in energy costs, though these gains have little to do with carbon footprint.

“We’re just moving the footprint,” states an executive that makes heavy use of equipment virtualization. Another interviewee preferred to think of cloud use as redundancy. “It’s cheaper to have that insurance in the cloud and only pay when you use it.”

Setting the bar

Paris-based Eutelsat, which merged with OneWeb last year, is one of the WTA’s top members and has made significant commitments to hit sustainability targets.

The company intends to halve its energy-related emissions by 2030, compared to 2021.

The company intended to see 2,000,000 KWh/year produced by on-site solar panels by 2025 across their sites in France, Italy, Portugal, and Mexico.

The work is backed up by Eutelsat’s cooperation with the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) to observe and track their targets, lending credibility and transparency to their work. James Matthews, director for corporate social responsibility at Eutelsat described it as a “non-negotiable element” of its commitments.

“Eutelsat is a very large organization with deep roots in government, which makes it a prime candidate for leading the standard,” WTA’s Bell explains. “Big companies can address these concerns on their own, but independent teleports have less to work with. They could stand to see how projects like these are done and what the payoff is… There’s a need to provide some visible leadership here.”

Eutelsat declined to comment, citing its position navigating a carve-out and partial sale project.

Crawley-based Arqiva doesn’t plan on being left behind. As the supplier of broadcasting services for digital TV and radio in the UK and more than 1,000 channels internationally through satellite, and connect 50 million smart metering data points every day.

“Arqiva has committed to be net zero by 2040 with an interim target to be net zero for Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2031,” Caroline Morris, Arqiva’s head of sustainability, tells DCD. It also sustains Scope 3 plans to collaborate with suppliers to support more carbon-efficient products.

The company states it has solar panels installed at some of its operational locations and is currently taking a “practical approach” to considering other microgeneration options in the future.

“We use a rationale that looks at avoiding use of energy through power reductions or replacing equipment with more efficient alternatives across all our operations, where absolute reductions cannot be made we purchase renewable energy,” Morris says.

Arqiva is also cooperating with SBTi, and aims to have a set of carbon reduction target validated by them by June 2025.

“We participate in the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) gaining a C rating for our last submission as well as external ESG benchmarking, gaining a silver medal from EcoVadis and a score of 82 for our last GRESB submission,” Morris says.

In January 2023, Orange announced plans to deploy 50,000 square meters of solar panels, with an installed capacity of 5MW, at its satellite communications site at Bercenay-en-Othe in France. These will supply 20 percent of the site’s energy needs. In September 2022, Leuk Teleport & Data Center, previously Signalhorn, sought to become Europe’s first 100 percent green teleport, deploying panels on the roof of its main building and 3,215 sqm (34,605 sq ft) of a defunct antenna at its site in Leuk, Switzerland.

Leading the way

With a remit to communicate what teleports can do to invest in mitigating their energy costs and green activist investors speaking their concerns, the WTA began running the Green Teleport program, a global design competition to connect Earth stations to universities and technical schools to create proposals to enable sustainability gains for the sites.

The project called upon universities to equip their students to submit reports on engineering, business, and operations solutions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions through energy efficiency.

The work would not only create useful catalysts for change, but aid the development of relationships between teleports and educational institutions to build talent pipelines for them.

“Some are starting from scratch on that, others are building existing relations,” explains Bell. “Our partners are also in competition with big tech’s grasp of new talent. They need the brightest minds they can find.”

The 2023 competition was won by the University of Ljubljana in collaboration with STN and their teleport in Slovenia. Their star innovation was a self-sufficient water-cooling system for the teleport’s server room, fed by solar panels, of which the site could support through its main building’s 1,200 sqm (12,900 sq ft) of roof surface accommodating 312 solar panels generating 124kW of DC power per hour, reinforced with the support of batteries and capacitors capable of serving electrical need through the night and refilling in the day.

Their proposed solar array provided double the energy required for the conventional AC cooling solution already used at the site.

Another key solution was a proposed change of antenna design, favoring a low directivity with a wide main lobe with a deep minimum in the middle, which would need to be mechanically redirected less often than a high directivity narrow lobe design. They proposed the introduction of patch-monopole antenna feeds.

“The introduction of the green technologies presented contributes to greater teleport autonomy, reducing the likelihood of service outages and increasing the reliability of operations,” the students explained in their winning report.

Second place went to the National Technological Institute of Mexico collaborating with Eutelsat’s Hermosillo teleport. Students calculated the site’s highest expense (excluding payroll and rent) was utility power, taking up 47 percent of the location’s costs according to billing information from 2018 to 2023.

They determined that the purchase of 144 solar panels, estimated to produce 446kW per hour in the sunny South American climate, would result in annual energy cost savings which would recoup their own capital expenditure investment in as few as two years with one of the solar providers analyzed.

The report recognizes the challenge of overheating and evaluates various cooling solutions to better address panel efficiency and longevity. While the region made solar an easy recommendation, students made pains to outline the effectiveness of an Aeromine system, a proprietary bladeless wind energy system that claims to outperform solar arrays of the same size.

These students brought a rare perspective to the hardened industry veterans they were collaborating with, breathing new (green) energy into discussions. Having worked with a lot of students himself, Bell was well-appraised of what they bring to the table.

“It leads to productive conversations about which new directions are practical and which aren’t,” he said. “Our goal [for the project] is to have 10-12 companies in the program every year who take real pride in the work to make for strong competition.”

Sustainability misgivings amid slim margins

As has been the case at the macroeconomic level, not everyone is convinced of the great green revolution of energy transition. Not all green interventions are equal on the balance sheet, and projects with less financial advantages can be interpreted as vainly as corporate art installations.

“Sometimes [expensive green projects] are more of a statement than a raw economic advantage. People see these very visible investments and think ‘oh, they’re good people,’” Bell speculates.

In its report, Eutelsat explained that 85 of the 96 hectares of land it owned at its Paris-Rambouillet teleport were used for organic agriculture, while Telesat mentioned its corporate headquarters’ use of rooftop beehives. Measures like these are vital to addressing climate change, but set them in the crosshairs of ideological reactionaries.

“[Trepidation around ESG] is very cultural. In the business community here in the United States, ESG really isn’t a topic. It doesn’t come up as a business driver on the level I see in Europe and Asia,” Bell explains. “It isn’t trepidation so much as concern about its relevance to the business. If it’s relevant, you can be sure business leaders will make sure people know they’re doing something about it.”

Participants in the WTA’s research were unanimous that renewable energy was less available in the United States than Europe, despite sites in California using 90 percent renewables, and an Electrodynamics facility in Brewster, Washington which relied solely on local hydroelectric power.

Most companies the WTA spoke to had yet to establish specific sustainability goals, most of which cited the obstacle of capex commitments that cannot be made. In an unforgiving race against big tech entrants like SpaceX, the priority for new investment was on services that could keep up with competition.

Cloud providers with ground station deployments, such as Amazon and Microsoft, claimed all their operations run on 100 percent renewable energy, having signed gigawatts worth of PPAs.

They have never, however, mentioned the energy use of their ground station operations in these deals or given an idea of their energy use.

“I think we are going to see players with intense power consumption doing what the hyperscalers are doing,” Bell predicts. “[They’ll be] working out how to layer their power delivery to enable greater resilience. That means solar and better batteries, and it comes from finding where the cost-efficiencies of what’s cheaper and better are. It’s inevitable, but the timescale is almost impossible to predict.”