How green is digital?
Businesses are increasingly committing to green agendas, and incorporating them into their business models and strategies. Advertising necessarily becomes part of that, with O2 and EDF recently signing up to green platforms for ads. But how ready is digital marketing to meet this challenge? And can digital platforms - as huge consumers of electricity - lead the way for renewable energy?
We analyse signs of sustainable ad buying, and whether the tech giants can lead the way on renewable energy.
Digital marketing as a sustainable marketplace
Sustainable consumption is a rising trend, in parallel with the current surge of ecommerce - where do the two overlap?
For advertisers committed to being environmentally aware businesses, then marketing options need to be available which are audited and which meet transparent criteria for sustainability.
There are moves in this direction from platforms and agencies. Havas Group’s ‘sustainability marketplace’, giving advertisers access to media publishers with records of environmental, social and economic targets set by the UN. In Google Shopping, you can select carbon neutral delivery as a filter.
More fundamentally, the largest digital platforms are also increasingly committed to environmental targets. Google proclaims that it has been carbon neutral since 2007; Facebook bought enough renewable energy to cover global operations for the first time in 2020, and Amazon aims to pass this marker in 2025. Microsoft have targets going even further: to become carbon negative, and remove all past carbon emissions from the atmosphere.
Tech giants in renewables race
The result of huge energy consumption growth and sustainable targets is that tech companies have become huge global buyers of renewable energy - 30% of publicly disclosed renewable energy purchased by corporations last year, according to Bloomberg. Amazon is the largest single corporation buying renewable energy in the world.
The scale of tech’s investments is changing the renewable market itself. But are they actually changing energy consumption, or simply generating huge new demand - for servers and data centres - and then meeting that demand with renewable energy where they can?
The tech giants are keen to outline ways they are doing both. Amazon only invests in renewable projects that wouldn’t go ahead without its support (as an anchor investor for the long term). Google is plotting ways to not only match energy use with renewable investment, but to make sure that energy on the grid which Google uses is renewable energy at every point in the day when it draws on it. Overall, tech corporations are agreeing to long term contracts - and set prices - providing a steady base for wind and solar projects, which matches or goes beyond those at state level.
Tech as an energy disruptor?
Tech is both a growing consumer of green energy, and an enabler of the transition, through its own drive for consumers and supply chains to move online. But can energy production itself become part of the tech industry?
Microsoft’s investment in a nuclear start up, Amazon’s wind farms, and Google’s subsidiary Google Energy are potential examples. Is tech looking to disrupt energy production? There are no real signs of this in terms of scale so far, as investments have been modest. Google plan to combine AI with its wind farm, to make wind energy more cost efficient - if rolled out globally, this kind of project could also make a difference to the viability of wind power beyond state support.
Perhaps also an optimistic sign is how tech companies have seen green energy as a competition between themselves - fighting to achieve their green targets, and strike long term clean energy deals. The rivalry of silicon valley is an unexpected element of tech which is emerging to shape the energy market towards an energy transition.
