EDF’s Transformation and Operational Efficiency Department has set up a mini website within the EDF group’s intranet devoted to digital responsibility, featuring educational videos (accessibility, smartphones, printing), ‘digital responsibility’ MOOCs, toolboxes, and interviews with employees, managers, and sponsors involved in the initiative.
The responsible digitalization programme also includes awareness-raising actions such as the OCCI Clean IT challenge. Over the course of a week, employees from the Occitanie Division’s digital business lines had the opportunity to attend a series of talks on responsible digitalization and get directly involved by taking part in challenges (cutting emails, collecting unused smartphones, cleaning servers).
Decreasing the carbon footprint of digital technology involves responsible use of IT and telephony. EDF is seeking to reduce the related environmental impact by extending the lifetime of hardware, promoting the circular economy, and seeking to bring down the average electricity consumption of servers (see section 3.2.4 “Waste and circular economy”).
| The first environmentally- responsible website in the energy sector |
Eco-designing digital services allows the key requirements of low-energy use and accessibility to be incorporated from the design stage. With this in mind, in 2021 Dalkia launched the first environmentally-responsible website in the energy sector, dividing the total number of web pages by 4, resulting in a 64% reduction in CO2 emissions compared to the previous website. The efficiency of the code was also reviewed, the number of servers was brought down from 7 to 2, and the backup space was reduced. The website meets 94% of the French general accessibility improvement guidelines (Référentiel général d’amélioration de l’accessibilité, RGAA). |
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Digital technology will only be responsible and sustainable if it is also accessible and inclusive and makes no discrimination, but for this, progress must be made in the following three inseparable areas: the IT work environment, applications and digital content. With accessibility in mind, EDF’s IT operator integrates appropriate peripheral devices, media, and software (zoom feature, voice recognition, etc.).
The EDF group considers digital technology as a key way of leveraging responsible development, opening up the way for innovations to reduce the impact of the Group and the services it provides in terms of carbon and resources, e.g.by the setting up in 2021 of the EDF Reutiliz digital platform (cf. section 3.2.4.3.2 “Optimisation of materials”).
Digital solutions allow customers to achieve energy savings, too. Customers can use the e.quilibres platform and the EDF and Me app to track the various ways they use electricity and target energy savings. For more details of these aspects of digital responsibility, see section 3.1.4.2.4 “Earning trust through quality of service”.
For extensive examples of how digital technology is used for customer support and development, see section 3.1 4 “Developing low-energy use and innovative energy services”.
| Open data |
Digital tools also encourage transparency and data-sharing. Since 2020, the EDF group decided to release its public data, in particular its consolidated financial statements, non-financial performance indicators, the Group’s installed capacity, the corresponding generation figures and operational data such as EDF Hydro’s average daily river flow data. It is released through an open data platform. |
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