Paper Notes - ICT sector electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions 2020
An updated look at the total electricity consumption and associated GHG emissions for the ICT sector in 2020. Paper notes on Malmodin et al. (2023).

Paper
Malmodin, Jens, Nina Lövehagen, Pernilla Bergmark, and Dag Lundén. “ICT Sector Electricity Consumption and Greenhouse Gas Emissions – 2020 Outcome.” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2023. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4424264.
Notes
This paper presents the most up to date analysis of the electricity consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions of the ICT sector.
It examines user devices, networks, and data centers, but components such as TVs and gaming devices are separated because they tend to fall outside of a tight definition of ICT.
ICT is estimated to account for ~4% of global electricity consumption in 2020.
Data center energy consumption is estimated at 223 TWh.
Network energy consumption is estimated at 272 TWh.

The full lifecycle of all equipment, including the use stage, translates to around 1.4% of global GHG emissions in 2020. The majority of this (57%) is from user devices with 37% of the GHG footprint from the embodied emissions.
Since 2015, total ICT emissions have increased by around 5%. Intensity has decreased (efficiency has increased) so per subscriber/user emissions are falling, but usage has increased dramatically. This is a classic example of the Jevons paradox.


Conclusions
The interesting thing about the methodology behind this paper is how much data has been collected from company reporting. This covers energy consumption as well as lifecycle assessments from specific products. There is still a significant modeling component from shipment data, but more and more organizations are publishing data so the estimates are more accurate.
It’s clear that the ICT industry has been focused on both efficiency (hardware energy efficiency and software infrastructure) and buying clean energy. This has resulted in a reduction in use-stage energy per subscription and carbon footprint per subscription even as usage has dramatically increased from 2007 to 2020. It provides another example of how wrong extrapolation-based projections are.
However, the total footprint is still increasing. More devices are being sold and most consumers are powering them using non-clean sources of energy. It’s difficult/impossible for consumers to make much difference here because they must rely on their local electricity grid to transition to clean energy.
I consider that individual impact on the environment rounds to zero because although some people will change their behavior, most won’t. If a relatively small number of manufacturers focus on their supply chain emissions and we continue with the clean energy transition for data centers and networks, a large portion of the ICT GHG emissions footprint could be addressed.