Every company contributes to climate change. That direct, negative impact is often referred to metaphorically as a corporate footprint. At the same time, the information, communications, and technology sector — or ICT as we’ll refer to it — is virtually unique in having a significant handprint. The handprint metaphor captures the fact that while ICT devices and networks embody carbon in their manufacturing, supply chain, and use, overall their applications in networks employed throughout society reduce greenhouse gas emissions more than they create them. And the good news is that ICT companies are here to help you reduce your footprint too.
So, what follows are some examples of handprints as well as of how government policies can promote a more rapid scaling of this effect to accelerate the transition to a net zero carbon world.
Why net zero? The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global expert body responsible for assessing the science, issued a report in 2018 concluding that keeping future warming in the atmosphere to below 1.5 degrees Celsius is necessary to avoid the worst potential consequences of climate change. This temperature limit, in turn, translates into achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. These goals were a significant increase in ambition for the UN agency. The previous assessment pointed to 2.0 degrees and an 80 percent reduction by 2050.
Despite the strength of the scientific consensus behind these goals, the last four years of federal policymaking in the United States has been characterized by an almost-rabid backtracking by the Trump administration with respect to previous American commitments and pledges. Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, replacing the Clean Power Plan, and reversing progress in auto fuel economy are just the most visible decisions undoing policy progress under President Obama.
Despite these federal policy reversals, the United States has made progress in reducing its GHG emissions. Indeed, during the mid-to late-2010s, total U.S. emission reductions have outpaced those of the European Union, which typically takes the moral high ground in this realm. This cut is largely due to three factors, namely the rapid shift in electricity generation from coal to natural gas, state-level renewable energy mandates, and leadership by American firms in making and delivering on GHG reduction commitments. One can only imagine what would have been accomplished if these efforts had been matched by an overarching federal program to coordinate and build on the achievements.
While the U.S. government has backtracked, the other big emitters have increased their ambition. The EU is pursuing its Green Deal, targeting a 55 percent reduction in emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2050, as per the IPCC’s latest goal. And China recently announced what is for them a very ambitious target, carbon neutrality by 2060. The Chinese are busy reflecting this goal in the development of their 14th Five-Year Plan.
The results of the U.S. election mean that one can assume that this policy asymmetry between the United States and the Chinese and EU may improve. Complementing continued leadership by many states — both blue and red — on mandating renewable power, we can expect Washington to legislating and implementing a wide variety of new policies. And policy progress is critical to meeting the climate change challenge, which will require nothing short of reinventing the way we generate, distribute, and use energy.
Where does my industry fit in this frame? Intuitively, perhaps, the energy embedded in ICT products and the electricity consumption associated with their use would suggest the industry has a large footprint and is a big part of the climate problem. This perception dates to the early 2000s and the first California energy crisis, which some blamed on data center growth — although ultimately the blame was laid at the feet of a badly designed electricity market and predacious behavior by some market participants like Enron. Indeed, around this time Forbes magazine published an article entitled “Dig More Coal, The PCs Are Coming.” But for now, while estimates vary, a reasonable sizing of the ICT industry’s share of global electricity consumption is approximately 4 percent, while its portion of global carbon emissions is less than 2 percent, according to a recent report by the Information Technology Industry Foundation. Focusing solely on U.S. data centers, a recent EPA-commissioned analysis by Lawrence Berkeley Labs determined that, in recent years, while the amount of data being processed in data centers has exploded dramatically, the total amount of electricity consumed in this process has in fact leveled off or declined slightly.
The foundation’s conclusion: “Alarmists claim the tech sector’s carbon footprint is mushrooming out of control. But they wildly misrepresent the facts. Not only is the ICT sector making significant progress in decarbonizing, but ICT is also a powerful technology that enables other sectors to become more efficient.”
This ability of the ICT sector — the entire network, including microchips, computers, Internet of Things sensors, smartphones and tablets, data centers, and networking equipment — to enable other sectors to improve their energy efficiency has been called various things. The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy has called it “Intelligent Efficiency.” The Alliance to Save Energy uses the term “Active Efficiency.” The International Energy Agency terms it “Digitalization.” Most recently, Intel and others have used the handprint-versus-footprint terminology used here.
The metaphor of an environmental footprint has of course been in use since “tread lightly on the Earth” posters during Earth Day. Whatever the terms, all companies, all industries, and all people have a footprint in terms of GHG emissions. The ICT industry has reduced its footprint and helps offset it via its wide handprint, the role of our technology in helping other sectors (and ours too of course) reduce their footprints. The concept of a handprint is much newer. And while other industries can claim some handprint impact (aluminum, for example, can help the auto industry reduce weight and thereby improve fuel economy), the ICT industry probably is unique in the breadth and extent of its handprint impact.
To better understand the handprint metaphor, let’s list some concrete examples of the phenomenon in action. Recent analysis by the ITU, a UN-affiliated international institution central to the global governance of the radio spectrum, classifies the climate-beneficial impacts of ICT systems into the discrete realms of climate monitoring, climate change mitigation, and climate change adaptation.
In the world of climate monitoring, ICT systems include weather satellites that can track the progress of hurricanes, typhoons, tornadoes, forest fires, and other potential indicators of climate change. Satellites and artificial intelligence software can also be instrumental in monitoring sea-level rise, enabling governmental agencies to map areas that need to enhance their resilience, and hence the survival of physical human infrastructure as well as natural habitat and sensitive ecosystems. The over-arching network that provides these benefits is the Global Observing System, a function of the World Meteorological Organization.
A significant percentage of world greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed to the growing, storing, transporting, selling, consumption — and wasting — of food. A wide variety of ICT systems play a role in this literal food chain, from sensors that monitor soil conditions to sensors that track the progress of food through the supply chain to the supermarket. In another agricultural realm, satellites can monitor deforestation as well as biomass growth as a result of reforestation and afforestation. Monitoring and quantification of biomass growth can be key to generating credits as part of established carbon markets. Here again, environmental and economic benefits obtain.
In the climate change mitigation realm, examples of ICT’s handprint contribution include energy-efficiency benefits, especially in the realm of end-use energy consumption. Virtually anything labelled as smart — cities, homes, buildings, and those new interactive speakers — generally involves the application of ICT devices and networks to optimize the energy performance of the system being managed. Smart home and building applications of digital technology include so-called “digital twining” tools that can be used to create virtual models of existing or proposed homes or buildings that can be used to simulate the energy-efficiency impacts of various design or retrofit options.
Further, increasing the ability of electricity grids to incorporate intermittent renewable energy sources is aided through advanced data analytics that are key to meeting the real-time balancing requirement facing grid managers. Perhaps most creatively, ICTs can play a role in addressing one of the biggest challenges inhibiting the further growth of renewable energy, namely the curtailment of renewable sources when the supply of such energy is excess to the grid’s requirements.
Most grids are based on fossil-fueled baseline generation that can be counted on to run 24/7 and can be increased or decreased as needed by consumers. Inherently variable renewable sources, absent adequate, affordable storage, can either generate too much or too little power. When the sun shines and the wind blows, grid managers may have to curtail their purchase of renewables due to the need for real-time supply-versus-demand balancing. ICT can not only help monitor and balance these loads, but a new idea being pioneered by Andrew Chien (University of Chicago) and Sangwon Suh and Jiajia Zheng (UC Santa Barbara) could help mitigate the problem. Their idea essentially is to identify data center computational “jobs” that can be time- and location-shifted, then transported over the Internet to be run in data centers where, real-time, there is an excess supply of renewables that would otherwise be curtailed.
Back on the farm, “precision agriculture” utilizes in-field sensors and GPS to track variability in soil conditions throughout a field. It allows optimizing the application of water, fertilizer, and pesticides to most efficiently maximize production with a minimum of inputs. This has environmental benefits as well as benefits to farmers’ bottom lines and is already proving popular with progressive growers.
The handprint plays a role in climate adaptation as well. Satellite imagery, GPS applications, and data analytics provide critical communications capabilities to first responders and distressed communities in dealing with weather or climate disasters. These same technologies play a key role in forward-thinking conservation, enabling planners and environmentalists to identify and prioritize certain areas for preservation. In a coastal ecosystem, for example, planners can use these technologies and sea-level rise models to target for preservation habitats that are likely to remain above the rising water levels.
Realizing the full handprint potential of ICT applications will not happen on its own. The technologies mentioned above are all on-the-shelf and already in, or
ready for, application. Behind them in the queue are a vast array of other on-the-drawing-board technologies waiting for a market. The newly burgeoning fields of the Internet of Things and AI promise vast new possibilities. So far, so good, but this is an arena where supportive public policies can play a crucial role. In somewhat simplified terms, companies and individuals invest in new technologies in two circumstances — either they must, due to some government mandate, or they want to, because of perceived cost savings, or both.
But there are no public policy magic bullets to promote handprint markets. Regulators are familiar with various policy levers to reduce the footprint of the ICT sector. The Energy Star program in the United States, the ErP Directive in Europe, and multiple requirements and labels in China all represent the Carpenter Principle: When you have a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. Regulators know how to reduce the ICT footprint, but they aren’t as familiar with means to increase the ICT handprint.
The classic example of this failure can be found in the European Union. Back in 2010, the European Commission launched what they termed the “ICT for Energy Efficiency Forum.” This was a commission-industry co-chaired initiative that, at its launch event, was pledged to focus on both the footprint and the handprint, although those terms were not used. Indeed, the initiative launched a workgroup focused on “enabling energy efficiency in other sectors using technology where there is greatest scope for energy efficiency improvements and emissions reductions: transport and logistics, buildings and construction, and energy supply, based on a snapshot of cities as a systemic way of looking at all sectors.” Great words and grand plans. Unfortunately, sod all for the handprint.
Fast forward to today and the Green Deal and the Circular Economy, two recent, significant policy thrusts in the mid-pandemic European Union. (Do not confuse the EU Green Deal with the proposal for a Green New Deal in the United States.) What do the Green Deal and the Circular Economy have to say about the handprint? The baseline premise of the Green Deal is that Europe will be climate neutral by 2050, in line with the IPCC’s recommendation. The European Commission has opined that “digitalization is an enabler of decarbonization” in all sectors of the EU economy. The commission places heavy emphasis, and rightly so, on the role of data and data analysis as key to delivering on the digital decarbonization promise. But despite some righteous words about the handprint, a casual perusal of the various reports and policy documents issued by the commission and its consultants makes it clear that, as far as ICT and the Green Deal are concerned, the focus is primarily on the footprint. This is even though some of the documents make it clear that ICTs can reduce more greenhouse gas emissions than they create.
Why is the EU seemingly so shortsighted? Mostly, I think that is due to the nail and hammer effect. Regulators know how to regulate the efficiency of ICT devices; how to incent the handprint is a tougher intellectual and policy challenge. A cynic might observe that another reason is the simple fact that the ICT industry includes very few EU-based champions. The industry is composed almost entirely of companies of American, Japanese, and Chinese lineage, easy targets for EU regulators.
Pivoting to the United States, what are the opportunities to advance the handprint via future climate policy initiatives in Washington or the states? Anticipating a climate policy-friendly environment in Washington, Intel has joined with several other companies as the founding members of a new policy-influencing group, the Digital Climate Alliance. DCA member companies (including also Johnson Controls, Trane Technologies, XCHG, Nautilus Data Technologies, and Enel) have experience developing and utilizing digital technologies to reduce their own footprint, as well as developing handprint markets so that those technologies can be used to reduce their customers’ footprint.
Utilizing that experience, DCA is building a library of handprint case studies that will serve as evidence to support policy advocacy. DCA may also participate in demonstration projects that shine a spotlight on handprint possibilities. The North Star of DCA advocacy will be the passage of a discrete digital title as part of successful climate legislation. Failing that, DCA will promote specific digital policy proposals that can be included individually in various pieces of climate, energy, and infrastructure legislation.
But what are some of these digital policies? At a high level, they are a collection of mandates and incentives through which the federal government can work with the ICT industry and its customers to enable the growth of handprint technology markets. Mandates can be effective means of overcoming market failures and defects, including for example a legislative requirement that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission develop a long-range infrastructure strategy with a major focus on using ICT to improve grid resilience to extreme climate and weather events.
Given the power of government procurement to create product markets and economies of scale, legislation could direct federal agencies to develop and implement plans for the procurement of ICT applications to reduce the footprint of their operations. The Department of Energy could be directed to document the benefits of these investments and communicate those benefits to the private sector generally. Where there are market benefits illuminated by DOE, well-managed companies will seek them out.
One of the most important future factors in advancing digital climate solutions will be policies to promote the transparency of information and the availability of energy-related data. The adage you can only manage what you can measure pertains here. For example, the federal government has a role to play in collecting, compiling, and harmonizing emissions data from load-serving entities, generators, renewables, and stored energy. Increased transparency into the emission profiles of our electricity grid at or near a real-time basis would enable consumers to understand the carbon footprint impact of their energy consumption and, in deregulated markets, to make informed choices regarding from whom to source. Similarly, recognizing that utility consumers have an ownership interest in their own consumption data would replicate the experience in those states that have adopted this policy — a flowering of technologies and consumer apps that help them manage and reduce their usage.
These transparency-oriented policies can also apply to the manufacturing and commodity sectors. Although technologies to help reduce industrial emissions are beginning to mature, there remains no clear and consistent way for the market to differentiate and value low-carbon industrial products compared to higher-polluting alternatives. This market challenge presents a new opportunity for the ICT industry to meet these needs by providing new monitoring, reporting, and verification applications to drive consumer awareness of corporate and product emissions profiles. This capability could be very useful to the steel and cement industries, which are striving to document their efforts to reduce the embedded carbon in their more innovative produce offerings.
Research, development, and demonstration projects are another role for the federal government. RD&D is key to the adoption of handprint technologies, owing to the conservatism of utilities and their state regulators. New technologies cannot find a market until they are well proven. Opportunities include, for example, directing DOE to undertake, with private-sector partners, demonstration projects to spotlight the benefits of various digital technologies, including dispatchable data centers that can thrive in an ebb and flow of tasks. A few projects have shown the potential for digitalizing electrical grid substations to make them more energy efficient, more resilient, and better able to integrate renewable energy sources onto the grid. But RD&D investments in this technology could conclusively demonstrate the value of such projects and make them more attractive to distribution utilities and state regulators. Another potentially fruitful realm involves vehicle-grid connectivity schemes that advance both electric car uptake and grid stability, such as utilizing the grid emission data mentioned above to inform optimal times to charge your vehicle, or using the energy stored in the batteries of parked vehicles to even renewable loads on the grid.
Paralleling RD&D, DOE’s existing outreach programs can be augmented to bring knowledge of the benefits of digitalization to small and medium-sized businesses. By building a virtual library of successful case studies and working directly in an “extension service” role with industrial enterprises, the government can help to close an information gap that is a primary barrier to handprint markets. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s existing extension programs can be augmented by adding precision agriculture to their outreach capabilities. The regular Farm Bill could provide powerful mandates and incentives for precision agriculture and other technology applications.
Tax incentives can also play a part. New technologies often carry a high price tag due to diseconomies of scale. Tax incentives have played a key part in increasing production volumes of solar and wind technologies, as well as electric cars, dramatically driving down per unit prices. The same could be true for many handprint applications.
Direct government financing is an important possibility. The Treasury Department could be directed to create an incubator program to facilitate loan funding of technology-based energy-efficiency applications, perhaps targeted to low-income communities. Establishment of “green bank” funding programs at the federal and state levels could be pivotal. The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provides a great template for how post-COVID recovery and infrastructure investment could prime handprint markets. And, given the key role of 5G connectivity in enabling handprint solutions, network investment must be part of the recovery.
Another priority of the recovery should be addressing social equity issues that have always been there but have been laid bare by our COVID-19 struggles. Righting environmental injustices will require actions on many levels. But ICT and the handprint can be part of the solution, starting with ensuring universal 5G access. Again, measurement is the basis of management and addressing the environmental aspects of social inequity. Remote sensing and networks of low-cost ICT monitors can provide the basis for documenting the real-time levels of pollutants in minority and low-income neighborhoods. Those same technologies can provide the same service in rural areas suffering from fugitive air emissions and water contamination from natural gas fracking.
Finally, as important as enabling the handprint is, the ICT sector needs to continue reducing its direct footprint. And the recent news there is mostly positive. PCs, servers, and most elements of the network have gotten dramatically more efficient over the last two decades. A recent consultant’s report to the European Commission documented that the electricity consumption of ICT products in the EU had actually decreased by 1.7 percent annually since 2012. The obvious conclusion: “Despite the exponential increase in data traffic and ICT product performances over the period, the energy efficiency of ICT-related products increased even more.” Coincidentally, a report on American data center electricity consumption commissioned by EPA concluded that demand was flat to down in recent years, despite an explosion of data computation.
These trends aren’t inevitable. But once again, because we can measure these trends, we are more likely to successfully manage them. Our ability to do so, while growing the handprint, will determine ICT’s net contribution to meeting the climate change challenge going forward. But we need a more supportive and overarching federal policy environment to allow a thousand apps to bloom. TEF
