The jury is still out on whether digitalisation has a net negative or positive impact on energy demand. Substitution, efficiency, and optimisation can help reduce demand; but rebound, induced demand and other effects can increase demand. The iDODDLE team scoured the literature to synthesise the evidence, focusing on a set of digital use cases or applications in the three main energy demand sectors: buildings, transport, industry. Then they travelled up to Stockholm to present the evidence at the ICT for Sustainability Conference 2024. For full details, see the conference paper and presentation, but as a taster: there’s strong evidence of both large reductions in energy use (e.g., shared ridehailing: -55% to -18%) and large increases in energy use (e.g., ridehailing: +41% to +90%). In some cases, there is evidence of both negative and positive impacts depending on deployment conditions or use context (e.g., e-retail: -94% to +140%; mobility-as-a-service: -50% to +20%). Study design also affects the uncertainty of digitalisation impacts.
Link to conference page: https://conf.researchr.org/home/ict4s-2024
Access the presentation slides here, in addition to the full paper.
Figure 1: Summary of indirect impacts on energy demand of digital use cases in the transport sector. Figure by Marcel Seger. Source: Wilson et al. (2024). ICT4S Conference Paper.