Fibre optics are critical infrastructure for society because they carry nearly all the global Internet traffic. Over the last years, we have seen an explosive increase of data rates in fibre optics. For instance, in the short-haul domain, the traffic between data centers experienced a 400% growth from 2016 to 2021. This growth is a challenge not only to the technology demands but also to energy consumption. A single state-of-the-art optical transponder can reach a total power consumption of 700W.