An op-ed on why the continent’s energy sector cannot afford to ignore its digital carbon footprint
There is a particular kind of irony reserved for the energy transition. Picture this: a leading African renewable energy developer publishes its annual sustainability report. It is a beautifully designed 80-page document full of solar megawatt data, just transition case studies, and carbon reduction targets. It is hosted on a server powered by coal or diesel. It has been downloaded 40,000 times. Nobody notices.
This is not a hypothetical. It describes, with reasonable accuracy, the current state of digital infrastructure across much of the continent’s fastest-growing sector.
While Africa’s energy industry has spent the past decade building the physical infrastructure for a clean future, the digital layer on top has been largely left unexamined. The result is what I would call a Greenwashing Loop: organisations spending millions to decarbonise their operations while inadvertently broadcasting those efforts on some of the most carbon-intensive digital infrastructure on earth.
The internet is not a cloud. It is coal. Or diesel.
The “cloud” framing of digital infrastructure has always been a sleight of hand. The internet is a physical machine: kilometres of undersea cables, warehouses of servers generating enormous heat, and cooling systems running around the clock. According to the International Energy Agency, data centres consumed roughly 460 terawatt-hours of electricity globally in 2022 (roughly equivalent to France’s entire annual electricity consumption), a figure the IEA projects will exceed 1,000 terawatt-hours by 2026 as AI workloads drive unprecedented demand growth.
For organisations operating in Africa, the question is not just how much energy the internet uses globally. It is where local energy comes from.
The answer varies considerably across the continent, but rarely in the way ESG communications would suggest. According to the African Energy Chamber, 41 per cent of Africa’s data centre infrastructure is concentrated in just three countries: South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria. Each tells a different story.
South Africa remains the continent’s primary digital hub and the main landing point for global cloud providers. According to CSIR’s 2024 utility-scale power generation statistics, coal accounted for 82 per cent of South Africa’s electricity generation in 2024, a figure that increased year-on-year as improved coal plant performance helped end load shedding. The rapid growth of hyperscale data centres from Amazon, Microsoft, and local providers is therefore not a clean story. It is, at best, a story of offsets and certificates.
Nigeria’s situation is arguably worse. With 17 major data centres requiring approximately 137 megawatts of power, the country’s notoriously unreliable national grid (providing, on average, around 4 hours of supply per day) forces most operators to run diesel generators as primary or backup power sources. The emissions profile of Nigeria’s digital infrastructure is, in practice, almost entirely fossil-fuel driven.
Egypt holds the largest fossil-fuel generation capacity on the continent, having more than doubled its fleet over the past decade, and remains heavily gas-dependent. As a growing hub for digital infrastructure connecting Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, it has a substantial emissions footprint that is largely invisible in corporate ESG disclosures.
Kenya offers the clearest counter-argument and the clearest model. With over 60 per cent of its grid already powered by renewables, including geothermal sources in the Naivasha zone, Kenya is attracting serious green data centre investment. A planned 100 megawatt facility backed by Microsoft and G42 is designed specifically to leverage this clean, non-intermittent supply. It demonstrates that aligning digital infrastructure with renewable energy goals is achievable on this continent. It simply requires the intention to pursue it.
The materiality problem CFOs are not asking about
Here is where it becomes a board-level issue rather than an IT department conversation.
The African Union’s Digital Transformation Strategy for Africa (2020-2030) and the African Digital Compact, adopted in 2024, both frame digital infrastructure as central to the continent’s sustainable development agenda. What neither does adequately is connect digital infrastructure to carbon accountability. That gap is closing.
Reporting frameworks, including the JSE’s Sustainability Disclosure Guidance and the EU’s recently adopted Green Claims Directive are tightening their expectations around Scope 3 emissions. Scope 3 captures indirect emissions across an organisation’s value chain. Digital infrastructure falls squarely into it.
If your investor relations portal, your ESG data dashboard, and your annual impact report are all hosted on fossil-fuel-powered servers, that carbon sits on your balance sheet whether you have accounted for it or not. The market is moving toward physical verification rather than accounting-based offsetting. Investors are increasingly distinguishing between an organisation that actually draws renewable power and one that has purchased a certificate to claim equivalence.
The gap between those two positions is where reputational risk lives.
The sustainability report deserves sustainable infrastructure
The standard sustainability report deserves particular scrutiny here, because it has become one of the more contradictory products in the ESG ecosystem.
These documents are frequently enormous: unoptimised PDF files running to 80 or 100 pages, saturated with high-resolution photography, complex infographics, and multiple embedded fonts. They are hosted on corporate servers with little attention to efficiency and downloaded thousands of times by analysts, regulators, and investors. According to the Website Carbon Calculator, the average web page generates around 0.5 grams of CO2 per page view. For a platform receiving 50,000 visitors a month, the cumulative footprint is substantial and entirely unmonitored.
The work itself is often excellent. The infrastructure it sits on is not.
What accountability actually looks like
The practical response to this is not especially complex, though it does require organisations to think about their digital operations with the same rigour they apply to physical ones.
The starting point is verified green hosting. Not offsets. Not certificates. Actual physical hosting infrastructure powered by documented renewable sources. The Green Web Foundation, an independent non-profit, maintains a publicly audited directory of verified green hosting providers globally. Their verification standard requires providers to demonstrate, not simply claim, that the electricity powering their servers comes from renewable sources.
In the African market, such verification remains rare. The Ethical Agency, a Cape Town-based creative agency, is currently the only organisation on the continent recognised by the Green Web Foundation as a verified provider of 100% renewable-energy-powered website hosting, a status that forms part of their B Corp certification, where they hold a sector-leading score of 111.7. They are a useful benchmark not because they are unique in their intentions, but because they have done the auditing work that most organisations in this space have not yet started.
The second component is design efficiency. The Sustainable Web Design community has developed a methodology for calculating the carbon impact of digital products and reducing it through code optimisation, asset compression, and the elimination of tracking scripts and auto-playing media that serve marketing dashboards more than actual users. Beyond the carbon argument, there is a strong accessibility case: leaner digital products perform better on low-bandwidth connections, which matters considerably across a continent where mobile data costs remain high relative to income and where the next generation of users is arriving primarily via mobile devices.
The question the energy sector needs to be asking
African renewable energy developers, fund managers, and infrastructure investors are, by necessity, sophisticated communicators. They produce disclosure documents that satisfy multilateral lenders, navigate the reporting requirements of international institutional investors, and understand that credibility in the ESG space is built on evidence, not assertion.
The digital layer of that credibility has not received the same attention. It should.
Every platform used to communicate a clean energy project, every portal through which investors track environmental impact data, every website that carries a net-zero commitment: each of these is a point of accountability as well as a point of exposure. The question is not whether the sector will eventually be required to account for its digital carbon footprint. It is whether organisations choose to get ahead of that requirement or wait until an auditor or a journalist does the maths for them.
Kenya is already showing what alignment looks like. The rest of the continent’s energy sector has the knowledge and the mandate to follow.
The author writes on sustainability communications, digital integrity, and the ESG implications of the built digital environment.
