The Dirty Secret of Clean Energy: Why Africa’s Renewables Boom is Running on a Fossil-Fuel Internet

At the edge of South Africa’s Northern Cape, rows of photovoltaic panels tilt toward the sun, silently harvesting megawatts of renewable electricity from one of the world’s best solar corridors. Hundreds of kilometres away, in a Johannesburg boardroom, an investor downloads a glossy sustainability report from a renewable-energy company promising a carbon-neutral future.

The scene captures a contradiction sitting quietly at the centre of South Africa’s energy transition. While the continent’s physical energy infrastructure is changing rapidly, the digital infrastructure used to communicate, finance, and verify that transition often remains deeply tied to fossil fuels.

The internet is a physical system of servers, cables, chips, cooling systems, data centres, cloud platforms, websites, investor dashboards, and downloadable PDFs. It uses electricity every second. In South Africa, where coal still generated 80% of electricity in 2025, according to Statistics SA, that means many “green” claims are still being published, hosted, and distributed through a carbon-heavy digital supply chain.

Renewables accounted for 9 percent of the country’s electricity mix in 2024, up from 2.1 percent in 2016, according to Stats SA. However, a renewable-energy company can build a solar plant in the Northern Cape, publish a sustainability report in Sandton, and still host that report on data servers drawing from a coal-heavy grid.

ESG Now spent time with Brett Jefferson, CEO of The Ethical Agency, where he argues that the contradiction is no longer a branding issue but a structural weakness in the way Africa communicates its energy transition.

“The internet is not a cloud,” Jefferson says. “It is a physical, resource-hungry machine.”

The Invisible Emissions of the Cloud

The internet is often spoken about as if it exists in the air. In reality, it is an enormous industrial system made up of data centres that consumed between 240-340 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity globally in 2022, while data-transmission networks used another 260 TWh to 360 TWh, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Together, digital infrastructure already represents a meaningful share of global electricity demand, and the agency expects that demand to rise sharply as AI, cloud computing, and digitalisation accelerate. The IEA projects that data-centre electricity demand alone could reach roughly 945 TWh globally by 2030.

Broader estimates by the IEA of the IT sector’s climate footprint are between 1.5 and 4 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions, according to the Carbon Brief, as AI-driven data-centre demand accelerates. If a renewable-energy company hosts its website on conventional infrastructure connected to a fossil-heavy grid, the platform used to communicate decarbonisation may itself be contributing to emissions.

The Hypocrisy of the Sustainability Report PDF

Companies routinely produce 100-page or 150-page integrated sustainability reports filled with high-resolution photographs, charts, videos, and embedded design elements. Those files are uploaded, stored, opened, downloaded and forwarded thousands of times by investors, journalists, regulators, civil-society groups, and communities. Each interaction may carry only a small carbon cost, but multiplied across large audiences and repeated reporting cycles, the footprint becomes harder to dismiss.

For the CEO of The Ethical Agency, that creates what he describes as a “Greenwashing Loop”, where clean-energy claims are carried by digital infrastructure that may still depend on fossil fuels.“The very platform used to report on decarbonisation is contributing to the problem it claims to solve,” says Jefferson.

Website Carbon Calculator estimates suggest an average webpage can emit fractions of a gram of CO2 equivalent per view, but emissions rise substantially as websites become heavier and traffic scales. For a corporate website that receives millions of visitors, these emissions accumulate quickly over time.

South Africa’s Data-Centre Boom and the Coal Problem

Johannesburg and Cape Town have emerged as major African data-centre hubs, attracting billions of rand in investment from global technology firms including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Google, and large colocation providers such as Teraco.

Microsoft announced in 2025 that it would invest an additional R5.4 billion in South African cloud and AI infrastructure by 2027 after already investing more than R20 billion over the previous three years. Amazon Web Services has meanwhile expanded renewable-energy procurement linked to its South African operations, including a 10 MW solar facility in the Northern Cape supplying electricity into the grid. Teraco has also moved to procure renewable energy through large-scale solar and wheeling agreements.

These investments matter because they demonstrate that major technology firms increasingly recognise that digital infrastructure can no longer remain disconnected from climate commitments.

However, most South African data centres still operate within a grid system overwhelmingly dominated by coal. While many companies use Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), carbon offsets or market-based accounting frameworks to support sustainability claims, there remains an important distinction between accounting-based neutrality and physically decarbonised infrastructure.

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s Scope 2 Guidance distinguishes between market-based accounting instruments such as RECs and the actual physical emissions profile of electricity grids. This distinction matters because investors, regulators, and sustainability analysts are becoming increasingly sophisticated in how they evaluate environmental claims.

Digital Inefficiency as an African Access Problem

The modern internet has become increasingly bloated. Websites are overloaded with autoplay videos, tracking scripts, excessive animations, redundant code, and advertising technologies that consume bandwidth and energy without improving user experience.

According to the HTTP Archive’s 2025 Web Almanac, the median desktop webpage now weighs roughly 2.9 megabytes, while median mobile pages exceed 2.6 megabytes. For users in highly connected economies, these inefficiencies may appear trivial. However, in Africa, they are not.

For an SME in South Africa, a community leader in rural Nigeria, or a municipal official trying to open an investor portal on a basic device, poor digital design becomes a real access barrier. A sustainability platform that cannot load on slow connections is not only inefficient; it is exclusionary.

In a continent where more than 40 percent of Africa’s population still lives without electricity and 70 percent lacks access to clean cooking, according to the World Bank, internet access defines who can participate in the clean-energy economy, who can read the report, who can scrutinise the data and who is left outside the conversation.

The Rise of Verifiable Green Hosting

The corporate response has often leaned on certificates, offsets, and market-based accounting. But those tools are not the same as proving that digital operations are physically powered by clean electricity.

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s Scope 2 guidance draws a clear distinction between location-based emissions, which reflect the average emissions intensity of the grid, and market-based emissions, which reflect the electricity a company has contractually chosen through instruments such as renewable-energy certificates.

A growing number of organisations now recognise that sustainability must extend beyond branding into the architecture of the internet itself. The Green Web Foundation says providers seeking green verification must show evidence of steps taken to “avoid, reduce, or offset” greenhouse-gas emissions linked to electricity used to provide their services. It also says a website can be marked green either by hosting with a green provider or by showing evidence that the provider itself meets the standard.

“The Green Web Foundation’s process requires proof of energy origin, moving beyond the vague net-zero claims that many hosting providers use to mask their continued dependence on coal,” says the CEO of The Ethical Agency.

The Ethical Agency, the Cape Town-based digital and sustainability communications company, has positioned itself in this space. The company states that it operates on 100 percent renewable-energy-powered hosting verified through the Green Web Foundation. B Lab’s public profile gives the company an overall B Impact Score of 111.7, well above the 80-point threshold required for B Corp certification and more than double the 50.9 median score for ordinary businesses completing the assessment.

“This level of verification is what the next era of ESG requires. It is no longer sufficient to carry a ‘sustainable’ label. Every metric must be citable, and every platform must be verified,” Jefferson says.

The Regulatory Tide Is Tightening

The EU’s Directive 2024/825 targets generic environmental claims and green marketing that cannot be substantiated, also known as “Green Washing”. From 27 September 2026, companies using terms such as “green”, “eco-friendly” or “climate-friendly” will face a tougher standard of proof in the European market. For African companies selling into European supply chains, raising European capital or using European sustainability language, vague digital-era green claims will carry rising legal and reputational risk.

Meanwhile, the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA) is moving South Africa’s anti-greenwashing regime from voluntary ESG language into regulated market conduct, using its 2026 Sustainable Finance Update to target “misleading sustainability-related claims” across product design, marketing, advice and customer communications.

 It is also preparing climate-related disclosure expectations for large JSE-listed companies aligned with the ISSB baseline, especially IFRS S2. This means banks, insurers, asset managers, and listed firms will face growing pressure to prove that ESG claims are backed by reliable, comparable, and audit-ready data.

Africa’s Strategic Opportunity

Despite the challenges, Africa has a chance to avoid repeating the digital mistakes of the Global North. Just as mobile banking allowed parts of the continent to leapfrog branch-heavy finance, clean-energy companies can leapfrog bloated, extractive and carbon-intensive digital design. They can build lean websites, compress reports, reduce unnecessary tracking, use verified green hosting, disclose digital emissions and design platforms that work on older devices and slower networks.

“By building lean, green-powered platforms from the ground up, African developers and agencies can set a new standard for what high-integrity digital communication looks like… proving that a credible future is one verified at every layer, from the solar panel in the field to the pixel on the screen,” says Jefferson.

The Truth Deserves a Clean Screen

Africa’s renewable-energy expansion represents one of the most important industrial and developmental transitions of the 21st century. But if the future is to be genuinely sustainable, the digital infrastructure supporting that transition cannot remain an afterthought. Websites, cloud systems, investor dashboards, ESG reports, and digital communication platforms are now part of the environmental footprint of the energy transition itself.

“When we talk about green energy, we should not be doing it through a coal-fired connection. The internet is the front door of the energy transition. It is time to make sure it is powered by the same sun and wind we are selling to the world,” Jefferson concludes.