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 “Radioactive and conventional waste, and Circular economy”).
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).
The Sustainable Digital programme issued a Sustainable Artificial Intelligence guide. It encourages simplifying AI systems to limit their environmental impact, as well as diversifying source data to prevent bias. Finally, the guide insists on the need for AI models to be explainable.
From 2022, EDF chose to add an end-of-publication date to all its social network posts to avoid unnecessarily maintaining obsolete publications. At the same time, wide-ranging steps were taken regarding historical posts: more than 11,000 tweets published since 2011 were deleted.
Digital technology will only be responsible and sustainable if it is also accessible and inclusive, without any form of discrimination. This is why EDF adopted a new digital accessibility policy in 2022, covering both the working environment of disabled EDF employees, accessibility of external and internal digital services (website, mobile apps, intranet, messaging), and digital communication (emailing, newsletters).
Improving datacentre energy efficiency is a powerful way to reduce the consumption of EDF’s digital services. Datacentres have been certified ISO 50001 since 2015 and EDF has already succeeded in reducing their energy consumption by 15% in five years, despite also doubling their computing power.
The EDF group sees digital technology as a key tool for sustainable development. It generates innovations reducing the Group’s impact in terms of carbon or resources and increasing the services it offers. See for example, the setup in 2021 of EDF’s Reutiliz digital platform (see section 3.2.4.3.2 “Optimising material and equipment”).
Digital solutions allow customers to achieve energy savings, too.
Customers can use the “e.quilibres” platform and the “EDF et moi” app to track the various ways they use electricity and target energy savings. For more details on these aspects of digital responsibility, see section 3.1.4.2.4 “Earning trust through quality of service”.
Waste heat from EDF’s Val-de-Reuil datacentre (Eure) will be recovered for use by its future business park neighbour, Eurapharma, which will enjoy an ambient temperature of 15 to 25° C in its warehouse. This project is a win-win in both ecological and economic terms, with 6GWh carbon-free per year for Eurapharma, and approx. €1 million extra Group income over a 10-year period from the sale of waste heat.
For extensive examples of how digital technology is used for customer support and development, see section 3.1.4 “Developing low electricity consumption and innovative energy services”.
Digital tools 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.
