NTT and Docomo to Pilot AI-Controlled Base Stations to Boost Renewable Energy Use and Demand Response

NTT Docomo and its parent company NTT have launched a joint demonstration project that uses artificial intelligence to coordinate radio base station communications-processing workloads alongside the operation of distributed energy resources, including solar generation and battery storage. The initiative marks the first time this technology has been deployed at a base station and is aimed at increasing renewable energy consumption while supporting demand response during periods of peak electricity demand.

The project addresses a longstanding limitation in conventional base station design, where communications equipment and power equipment have typically been controlled independently. This separation has made it difficult to adjust communications operations in response to fluctuating renewable energy generation under normal conditions, or to coordinate effectively during power outages. To overcome this, the companies are employing workload shifting technology to move communications-processing workloads between base stations, combined with Docomo's energy management system capable of managing distributed energy resources. Under the current plan, which the companies calculated using AI, NTT will control the communications load at each station while Docomo will manage the storage batteries.

NTT will construct a verification environment using open-source software to simulate the communications processing performed by a virtualized radio access network, then connect that environment to Docomo's base stations to test the technology's effectiveness. The companies intend to demonstrate the system's ability to increase renewable energy use and help stabilize the power grid through demand response when electricity supply and demand are tight. According to the companies, this will enable base stations handling communications processing to switch flexibly in response to renewable energy generation, thereby using previously underutilized renewable energy.

Docomo and NTT plan to complete the demonstration by the end of December 2026 and evaluate the new technology's effectiveness. The companies have also floated the possibility of linking the technology to data centers and, in the future, extending it to a wider range of energy sources. NTT holds a significant data center portfolio, much of it based in the Asia-Pacific region, and earlier this month was reported to be finalizing an agreement with Anthropic for the development of a $6.3 billion data center in Western Japan. NTT Docomo is a subsidiary of the NTT Group and Japan's largest mobile phone and wireless carrier, serving more than 73 million customers across its mobile, 5G, and expanded digital services network.