The 5G requirements catalogue TS 22.261 now tells networks to expose how much energy a service consumes, where that energy comes from and what it emits — and to let services adjust to that information. The surrounding Release 20 family finished across five working groups in June 2026.
Energy has so far been an internal operations metric: operators measured it, nobody sold by it. Energy Efficiency as Service Criteria makes it a service parameter — something a business customer can request, compare and pay for. This article walks through what the requirements actually promise, who pushed them into the standard, and which hard parts remain unsolved.
The requirements group energy information into four categories: energy consumption, the energy supply mix, carbon-equivalent (CO2e) emissions, and energy capacity and availability. Networks should be able to expose these characteristics — in a deliberately feasible and limited way — to customers and third parties, and accept service adjustments based on them. The study behind the work (TR 22.883) also sets consolidated KPIs for how granular and how frequent that information needs to be to be useful rather than decorative.
The use cases are concrete. An enterprise wants CO2e transparency across the end-to-end chain — networks, applications and devices — so emissions can be measured and attributed, not estimated. An energy company changes the supply mix in a region as wind and solar conditions shift, and the operator adapts service provisioning to raise the share of renewables without degrading the experience. And for power-constrained devices such as XR glasses, an energy-saving service trades transmission patterns against battery weight that, as the study dryly notes, must stay very light for anyone to want the product.
The push came from operators. Phase 1 in Release 19 was led by China Mobile; the Phase 2 work item, approved at the SA#107 plenary in Incheon in March 2025 with Nokia’s Laurent-Walter Goix as rapporteur, lists sixteen supporting members — AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, KPN, LG Uplus, NTT DOCOMO, Orange and Telefónica among the operators, joined by Nokia, Huawei, Qualcomm, Samsung, vivo, Futurewei, TNO and SyncTechno. New requirements landed in TS 22.261 in June 2025, and companion studies in architecture (TR 23.700-44), management (TR 28.885) and media (TR 26.942) completed the family a year later.
The study itself flags the weak points. Attribution is unsolved: splitting a base station’s consumption fairly across services and customers is a methodology question, not a measurement one. The KPI notes warn that savings must be net — shifting consumption elsewhere and reporting the local drop is exactly what the requirements are not supposed to reward. And a trustworthy end-to-end CO2e number needs measurements that cross network, cloud and device domains, which 3GPP cannot standardize alone; the report maps a list of other standards bodies working on the same metrics.
What remains open is everything between requirements and a product. Stage 1 defines what the system shall do; the architecture work concluded as a study, so how the exposure and adjustment mechanisms are built is a decision for a future release. Nobody has committed to pricing models, and it is unclear whether demand will come from customers or from carbon-reporting regulation. The requirements give operators a knob worth selling — whether anyone builds the dial is the part standardization cannot answer.