Impact of Users’ Behavior on Digital Service Energy Consumption

Energy consumption in the realm of ICT is raising concerns, challenging the prospect of achieving net-zero emissions. ICT solutions are seen as efficient and low-cost, yet their impacts leave notable footprints. The high demand for digital services, such as online shopping, is contributing to the increased energy consumption of digital infrastructure. Energy consumption in the digital domain is largely attributed to the hardware and software capabilities and the infrastructure that supports them, while users and their behavioral influences on this consumption are overlooked. However, users are the drivers that power these services; their behavior and usage patterns translate to the energy used by both the software and hardware components. In this context, we investigate the impact of user behavior on the energy consumption of digital services, as effective and efficient technology alone might not provide sufficient change in achieving the desired net-zero emissions. To explore the impact of user behavior on the energy consumption of digital services, we use online shopping as a case study. The objective is to understand how diverse user interactions within the online shopping domain influence client-side and serverside energy usage. To this end, we deployed a mixed research methodology, combining theoretical and empirical analysis, and found significant differences in the energy impact of different users’ actions. Our results show that product browsing and product filtering are the user actions with significant energy impact on the server side.