Energy saving and care for the environment to support future growth

How to combine economic growth while respecting the environment and needing to cope with a shortage in resources? Sustainable growth – i.e. a long-term development pattern compatible with environmental issues - is one of the European Union’s priorities. The EU is committed to building a low carbon society by setting ambitious energy and climate change objectives for 2020: to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20%, to increase the share of renewable energy to 20% and to make a 20% improvement in energy efficiency. Great attention is given to the contribution that policies, business strategies and individual behaviour can bring to achieve a more sustainable society. Information and Communication Technologies play an important role in this respect, supporting less resource-intensive production and allowing energy saving in for example buildings, transport and electricity networks.
Furthermore, ICT can provide useful information about environmental parameters and personal behaviour, raising awareness and triggering a more responsible attitude with respect to energy use.
In order to make this happen, the Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE) emphasises the importance of quantifying the ICT industry’s own energy performance and carbon footprint as well as its potential to render sectors such as buildings, transport and energy distribution more energy efficient. This is why the DAE stresses the importance of cross-sector industrial cooperation to accelerate the development and implementation of ICT-based solutions for smart grids (i.e. electricity networks using digital technology) and meters (i.e. electrical devices that record consumption), near-zero energy buildings and transport systems. In this regard the DAE has set specific targets:

establishing a commonly agreed methodology to quantify the energy and carbon footprint of ICT goods, services and companies;
supporting partnerships between the ICT sector and major emitting sectors (e.g. buildings and construction, transport and logistics, energy distribution) to improve energy efficiency and substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2013;
assessing the potential contribution of smart grids to the decarbonisation of the economy and promoting their interoperability;
reaching an agreement between member states on common functionalities for smart meters.

Besides the actions mentioned above, the European Commission is also funding a whole series of projects to improve the energy efficiency of data centres and to investigate how ICT could reduce energy and water consumption in other sectors such as buildings and grids.

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