No, Digital Solutions Won’t Reduce Global Emissions by up to 20%

In a World Economic Forum article, Manju George , Karen O'Regan and Alexander Holst explore the potential of digital solutions to reduce carbon emissions.

“If brought to scale, digital technologies could reduce emissions by 20% by 2050 in the three highest-emitting sectors: energy, materials, and mobility,” they write.

For the energy sector, they see digital use cases that can deliver up to 8% of greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions by 2050.?

The technologies they focus on include four high-impact clusters:

? Decision-making technologies that augment human intelligence.

? Sensing and control technologies that collect data and alter physical processes to be more sustainable.

? Enabling technologies that are core for any digital business today to realise benefits.

? Foundational technologies that exist within current operations.

At True Energy, we are firm believers in technology’s positive sustainability potential.

That is why we believe the 20% reduction in global emissions is too low.

And here are three main reasons why:

For one, we invariably underestimate new technologies' potential and growth rates. Early computers were dismissed as too bulky and expensive. Flip phones were ok, but who saw them leading to advanced smartphones and IoT? Similar dynamics apply to the sudden growth in AI’s capabilities – not to mention renewables and EVs.

We believe these digital technologies hold vast promise for large reductions in carbon emissions.

Secondly, many other digital solutions have untapped carbon reduction potential.

It is a subject explored in an article by Kirstine Finnemann from DI - Dansk Industri (Dansk Industri), a private business and employers' organisation representing approximately 20,000 companies in Denmark.

In the article, Andreas Espersen , one of the organisation's digital leaders, talks about how digitisation could save millions of tons of CO2.

“We don’t need to wait for a technological breakthrough in the green transition. Many of the solutions already exist and hold huge potential to scale across industries and sections,” Andreas Holbak Espersen says.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the combination of digital solutions throughout industries, such as the energy sector, holds massive potential for companies and their customers. ?

One example is smart meters. As Landis+Gyr details in an eloquent summary, smart meters enable meaningful energy efficiency gains and the integration of renewable resources into the supply network, allowing utilities and energy consumers to reduce CO2 emissions substantially.

In the financial year 2020, the company’s product and technology helped to enable a reduction of 8.5 million tons of direct CO2 emissions through its installed smart meter base, enough to provide electricity to homes in San Diego (USA) for a year.

Similarly, True Energy A/S - a Landis+Gyr Company ’s solutions for advanced smart charging provide multiple benefits. For EV drivers, one is to charge when energy production has the lowest carbon footprint. For energy companies, they include better integration of renewable energy sources and load balancing that lessons grid stress.

In this way, we think that the sum of the parts is greater than the whole – and that we could well see digital solutions contribute to much more than an 8% GHG reduction for the energy industry and a 20% reduction across industries.