Research warns of the hurdles facing the EU’s energy and digital transition

The European Union launched the NextGenerationEU restoration plan in 2020 to handle the financial disaster attributable to the COVID pandemic. In Spain, this plan has taken the type of investments that purpose to extend productiveness and progress, transitioning in the direction of a greener, extra digital and inclusive society. These goals are aligned with the European Inexperienced Deal offered earlier than the pandemic, which launched the thought of a twin transition: inexperienced and digital.

The Spanish restoration plan has 12 Strategic Tasks for Financial Restoration and Transformation (PERTE) that embody measures geared toward reinforcing strategic areas akin to renewable vitality. The funds allotted to initiatives on this space exceeded €8.4 billion in February 2025, the biggest quantity in all of the initiatives.

The Open College of Catalonia (UOC), publishes open accesshas examined 263 initiatives funded by the PERTE for renewable vitality, renewable hydrogen and storage, which included digital technologies. The purpose was to find out the extent to which these initiatives achieved the target of the dual transition—vitality and digital—focused by the EU.

“In our study, we found that there is no transition taking place in the sense of ending the use of fossil fuels and replacing them with renewable energy sources. Instead, the consumption of renewable energy sources is being added to the existing consumption of fossil fuels, which is continuing to grow,” defined Zora Kovacic, a researcher on the UOC’s City Transformation and International Change Laboratory (TURBA Lab) and co-author of the research, which has been published within the journal Environmental Science & Coverage.

The evaluation exhibits that the problem in changing one vitality supply with one other isn’t a difficulty of inadequate digitalization. Kovacic, who can also be a member of the College of Economics and Enterprise, gives transport for instance. “Digitalization isn’t the key: both a combustion engine and an electric engine can be used in a vehicle with digital technologies. We expect digitalization to provide answers to a complex challenge like the energy transition, but digitalization is only part of the answer.”

The challenges of the dual transition

The research, co-authored by Cristina García Casañas, a fellow researcher at TURBA Lab, lined initiatives with funding selections printed between 2020 and September 2023. In these initiatives associated to the vitality transition, the researchers recognized the digital applied sciences involved: artificial intelligence and clever robotics, data-driven applied sciences, the Web of Issues, computing infrastructure, software program and know-how providers, distributed ledger know-how, and augmented actuality and metaverses.

Based mostly on these initiatives, the authors thought of three questions: what does the digitalization of the Spanish vitality sector entail in apply? To what extent does digital innovation contribute to the vitality transition? Does digital innovation within the vitality sector reside as much as the declare that the advantages are socialized, by way of the thought of a good vitality transition?

The research exhibits that regardless of the keenness surrounding digital innovation, and though the initiatives analyzed have too brief a time span to find out whether or not or not digitalization can contribute to the vitality transition, the outlook could also be much like that of sensible grids, which have been in growth for twenty years with no clear outcomes for sustainability.

“The challenge isn’t to achieve the twin transition, but to ensure that the two transitions don’t create more problems than the benefits they provide: digitalization has very high costs in terms of energy, water and rare materials if it’s implemented on a large scale, which seems to be the aim of the digital transition, and it can lead to significant environmental problems,” Kovacic stated.

The main beneficiaries of ‘inexperienced’ funding

As for the doable socialization of advantages, the research exhibits the rising involvement of know-how builders and personal actors. The calls studied primarily present funding for consortia (82% of the initiatives), which are sometimes led by vitality sector firms together with Naturgy, Repsol, Técnicas Reunidas, Iberdrola and Cuerva Energía. Based on the research, the operators and homeowners of the grid will inevitably be the primary beneficiaries of funding for its transformation.

“Our political discourse suggests that focusing digitalization on major social challenges is a way to socialize its benefits, but in practice, given how policies are designed and implemented, it’s obvious that this is difficult to achieve,” Kovacic identified.

Though the research focuses on the case in Spain, the authors say that their research is related for all EU international locations which have acquired funding from the NextGenerationEU program, because it requires that the funds be focused in the direction of the inexperienced and digital transitions. It might even be helpful for international locations outdoors the EU, akin to Brazil, India and South Africa, that are creating sensible grid initiatives.