Why We’re Aiming for a Sustainable Digital Future
It would take a lot more than a single blog post to list all the benefits digital technology brings to the world.
‘Digital transformation’ has become a term synonymous with the digital experience in business. But in a broader sense, technology is transforming our lives in fundamental ways – the way we communicate and connect, the way we transact and interact, the way we understand the world around us.
The majority of these changes are very much for the better. But it’s very rare in life that you get all pros without any cons.
One of the drawbacks the digital industry is having to confront is its environmental impact. Digital tech is a major consumer of energy, which also means it is now a significant contributor to CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions.
And the uncomfortable truth is that, even as digital technology continues to evolve and grow in many wonderful ways, its environmental impact is on the increase, too. There are serious concerns, for example, about all the extra compute power AI demands. More compute power means more data centres. More data centres means more energy consumption… you get the picture.
As a digital marketing agency, Key Element’s entire business is built around digital, web-based technologies. You can’t run website design and development, or online branding and marketing, or SEO services, or everything else we offer, without digital technology. So we’re mindful of our impact. And we are already committed to doing what we can to make our business more environmentally friendly. Here’s why we believe it matters, and what we are doing.
What’s the issue with digital tech?
Digital technology relies on electricity. Every app, every platform, every website that we build needs a device to run on. Every device – desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone – runs on electricity. Without electricity, there would be no digital revolution.
Burning fossil fuels to generate electricity has been a major driver of carbon emissions and climate change over the past century. Even today, the energy sector remains the biggest source of carbon emissions globally.
The role of information and digital technologies in this statistic can’t be overlooked. As well as switching from fossil fuel-based electricity production, one of the key strategies for reducing carbon emissions is to reduce demand for energy. But demand from digital tech is running in the opposite direction.
The amount of energy consumed by digital technology continues to increase. In 2024, global electricity consumption rose at nearly double the average rate seen over the previous decade. One of the reasons given for this was accelerating demand from data centres.
Data centres are central to modern digital infrastructure. While your laptop and smartphone consume electricity, the amounts in question pale in comparison to the giant server banks that run everything from the internet to remote cloud access for all your apps. Data centres alone are currently believed to consume 1% of the world’s electricity, although in more developed regions like the US and Europe with more advanced digital infrastructure, this figure can be four or five times as much.
The concern is, just as the world desperately tries to reduce carbon emissions to prevent irreversible and catastrophic global warming, energy demands from data centres are forecast to double by 2030 – much faster than any realistic transition to renewable energy.
There are two main drivers of this explosion in data centre energy demands. One is the fact that huge swathes of the world are playing catch-up on digitisation and are therefore investing heavily in building their own infrastructure, with all the growth in consumption that brings.
The other is AI. AI may turn out to be responsible for the biggest transformations in our technological capabilities yet. But all those algorithms, all those deep learning models and neural networks, they all need compute power to run. They all need electricity. In the US, it is forecast that by 2030, AI applications will consume more electricity than all manufacturing combined.
We’re already seeing the environmental consequences. In reporting a 23% spike in its carbon emissions since 2020, Microsoft pointed the finger squarely at the expansion of its data centres to accommodate AI demands.
Offsetting the digital impact
Looking forward, the ambition is that more and more of the energy used to run digital (and other) technologies will come from renewable sources, lowering the digital carbon footprint at a stroke. Ambitious targets suggest that 100% of the UK’s electricity demands could be met from renewable sources as soon as 2035. But given that the figure stands at around 50% at present, that will require a massive investment in infrastructure over the next decade.
In the medium term at least, fossil fuels will continue to play an important role in meeting the growing demand for electrical power around the world. That puts the ball back in the tech industry’s court to do its part in reducing its energy demands.
At the data centre level, this is playing out in the pursuit of improved energy efficiency. The key targets are server designs that simply consume less power, and better approaches to heat management and cooling. Software also has a role to play – and, ironically, AI could be key. AI algorithms are evolving to be more efficient in the processing demands they make on hardware, as famously highlighted by the launch of the DeepSeek generative AI chatbot in early 2025. AI can also be applied to modelling optimised power consumption, automating shutdown of machines when they are not needed, and helping engineers design more energy-efficient components, machines and data centres.
Finally, responsibility for the carbon footprint of digital tech doesn’t solely rest with data centre operators and the big tech AI giants. The wider tech ecosystem shouldn’t leave it to them to improve the sustainability of digital tech, any more than data centre operators should shrug their shoulders and wait for all electricity to come from renewable sources.
At Key Element, we do our best to look beyond the day-to-day running of our business and consider our wider impact on the world. We know that the servers and devices that our websites and apps run on are to some degree, powered by electricity from fossil fuel sources. In a bid to reduce the carbon footprint of what we do, we have teamed up with Ecologi, an enterprise that supports carbon capture and environmental infrastructure projects around the world.
Carbon offsetting is a positive way we can all contribute to reducing the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. By planting more trees, for example, we can offset the CO2 released by industrial processes, because trees ‘breathe in’ CO2 as part of the process of photosynthesis.
Through our partnership with Ecologi, we have funded the planting of thousands of trees in Africa as part of wide-ranging reforestation projects. We have also helped with the conservation of forests and peatlands in Columbia and Indonesia, helped reduce methane emissions from landfill sites in Brazil, and supported renewable energy projects in Vietnam, Bulgaria, India and Chile.
To date, our work with Ecologi has amounted to the capture of close to 250 tonnes of CO2 – equivalent to more than 600,000 miles in a car, 190 long-haul flights, and nearly 750m sq of sea ice preserved.
As a digital agency and as individual tech users, we might not be able to accelerate the adoption of greener renewable energy resources beyond adding our voices to those calling for change. And long term, carbon offsetting is not a replacement for lowering emissions. But it’s something those of us further down the digital chain can do, now, enabled by the work of organisations like Ecologi.
At Key Element, we’re committed to achieving a more sustainable digital future and we will continue to explore opportunities to play our part.
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Matthew Cowell
