Published in La Tribune, 8, January 2025
By reducing the need to travel, automating production, enabling best practices to be generalized, and facilitating administrative procedures and financial transactions, digitization is leading us towards an economy that is more sober in terms of energy consumption and environmental pollution. Nevertheless, it requires a steady supply of electricity, which digital service providers are securing through long-term contracts, and even by acquiring stakes in the electricity industry.
Energy for the 3.0 Economy
If we consider just the annual electricity consumption of a smartphone (around 10 Wh/d x 365 days = 3.65 kWh for its daily recharge, according to CDE), with an estimated 70 million smartphones in France, we reach the figure of 255 GWh per year, which may seem negligible compared to the 445,700 GWh of total consumption in 2023. Nevertheless, the energy needs of the digital economy are not limited to smartphone consumption. They also include the energy requirements of the entire infrastructure used by smartphones, PCs and desktops, and servers dedicated to storing the data consulted. When designing data centers, significant energy savings can be achieved by adopting strict rules for power supply, cooling and heat recovery, not to mention environmental sustainability requirements (see Schneider electric).
The fact remains, however, that galloping digitization and the development of Artificial Intelligence are driving massive investment in new data centers, whose energy consumption - still reasonable on the scale of the countries that host them (around 1% according to the International Energy Agency) - is growing steadily. It is also a source of network problems, due to the geographical concentration of these needs. We need, and will increasingly need, large quantities of energy delivered to specific grid nodes on a more regular basis than renewables can provide. So, it's not surprising to see digital giants securing their supplies through long-term contracts with controllable power plant operators, and even, for some, by investing in the power industry...
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