A study commissioned by the UK's Department for Energy Security and Net Zero has found that digital services, from video streaming to AI translation, use no more electricity than the physical products and services they replace, and often substantially less.
The research, carried out by Europe Economics, built a new method for comparing electricity use across the full path a service takes to reach a customer. For digital delivery, that path covers the data centre itself (its computing equipment plus the cooling and power systems that keep it running), the network that carries the data, and the device the customer uses to watch, read or translate. For the physical alternative, the study counted energy spent on manufacturing, transport, retail operations, office-based service delivery and the customer's own device.
Three services, three physical rivals
The report tested three pairs of digital and physical delivery, running the energy math under low, medium and high assumptions for each:
- Video streaming versus Blu-ray discs
- E-book reading versus printed books
- AI-powered translation versus human translation
In all three comparisons, the digital option matched the electricity use of its physical rival or beat it by a wide margin, the report found.
The method also strips out a common blind spot in this kind of comparison: the extra activity that digitalization itself can cause, such as cheaper access driving more streaming or reading. Instead of counting that added demand, the study holds the amount of service delivered constant and compares the energy cost of delivering it digitally against delivering it physically, a way of isolating the delivery method from any knock-on growth in use.
The department has since posted an update to the same page noting a follow-up study, meaning this comparison is a first step rather than the final word on how data centre growth affects UK power demand. That question sits alongside other pressures on energy markets as computing demand keeps climbing.
