We cannot solve the transition towards a lower carbon environment by only changing how energy is produced. At some point, we also must confront how much energy we demand.
We’ve held the view for some time that the route to a lower-carbon environment should not focus on decarbonising power generation in isolation. It also needs to address why we generate so much power in the first place. Cleaner energy matters, but if demand keeps rising unchecked, we risk making the transition far harder than it needs to be. That means consumers and businesses must accept that some behaviours, and our understanding of where carbon is produced, need to change.
Lowering demand falls into two categories: efficiency improvements and reduced consumption. Manufacturers need to optimise processes, invest in modern infrastructure, and ensure transportation routes use the lowest-carbon methods available.
As consumers, being more considered about what we buy should mean less is produced. It is a simple challenge to describe, but a complicated one to solve. It comes down to understanding what we do, why we do it, and how we can reduce the impact. If we can address both efficiency and consumption, energy demand will fall — which is what we need to achieve.
Education and support are not effective enough today, and that is a key barrier to moving forward. Consumers have Net Zero fatigue and little trust in what is presented to them — and it’s easy to understand why. In too many cases, legal challenges against environmental claims have damaged confidence.
The purpose of this article is to put what we are doing today, and the direction we are currently heading, into a visual context that is easy to understand and to highlight what we need to do to move forward with purpose.
For many companies, this is a complex challenge. Supply chains have historically been optimised for cost and speed, with limited consideration of other variables such as environmental impact. The pursuit of the lowest cost has not only created friction within supply chains; it has also created layers of potentially redundant movement of goods.
Evaluating a supply chain with the aim of achieving carbon neutrality is the wrong starting point. With today’s technology, particularly in transportation, full carbon neutrality is simply not realistic for most companies. A better objective is to understand where carbon is being produced, then identify practical ways to reduce it. Some of these changes will be relatively easy to implement, such as machinery upgrades or the installation of on-site renewable energy. Others, such as sourcing nearer to shore, require more planning but are still highly achievable. Migrating air freight to sea is more complex because companies need to consider the working capital impact of holding inventory for longer, but it is still achievable.
The prize from this exercise is much broader than environmental impact alone. To reduce carbon across a supply chain, companies first need to understand how that supply chain operates at a granular level. Most buyers do not have that visibility today. Once they do, the benefits can extend well beyond emissions reduction, including operational streamlining, stronger supplier relationships, more stable supply, improved efficiency, better tariff management, reduced country concentration risk, more accurate pricing strategy, and stronger working capital management.
Global electricity demand has been increasing at around 4% per year. In 2025, global electricity generation was approximately 32,400 terawatt hours, with around 45% still coming from fossil fuel sources.
To put that into context, replacing this much fossil-fuel electricity with solar would require nearly 800,000 km² of land — roughly equivalent to the size of Türkiye.
Reducing energy consumption is becoming much tougher in today’s environment. Vehicle electrification and AI are both significant and growing sources of electricity demand.
There are an estimated 1.46 billion passenger cars and light-duty trucks on the road globally, with EVs representing around 4%. If all fossil-fuel cars were replaced with EVs overnight, electricity demand would increase by approximately 4,700 TWh per year.
That increase in demand would require an additional solar array of 256,000 km² — a land mass equivalent to New Zealand.
For many, the jury is still out on electric cars. They are one of several solutions that can make a difference, but the direction of travel still feels too narrow. Many can see a future where hybrids running on sustainable fuels, together with modifications to existing combustion-engine cars, become part of the mainstream solution.
The figures around future AI electricity demand are highly subjective. Sam Altman has suggested that AI may require 1,000 times more power than it does today, while more conservative estimates point to around 1,100 TWh of electricity over the next 10 years. On a solar-only basis, that conservative estimate would require roughly 60,000 km² of land — about the size of Sri Lanka.
We’ve written extensively about the rapid acceleration of AI. Its power demand is only one of the challenges we will face over the next 10 years. Unless the economics become prohibitive which naturally curtails usage, we expect regulation or taxes will be introduced at some point.
Understanding the demand profile in the future matters because the challenge is not only the electricity we use today. It is the additional demand we are layering on top of an already expanding system.
If we also factor in the historical 4% annual increase in power demand, the additional land required over the next 10 years for new solar capacity would be around 850,000 km² — a landmass roughly the size of Venezuela.
Put simply, if we continue the current trajectory — historical demand growth, vehicle electrification, and projected AI demand — the solar land requirement to remove fossil fuels from global power generation would be roughly 2 million km², equivalent to the land area of Mexico.
Of course, no one would centralise power generation in this way. The point of the comparison is not to propose a literal solar footprint, but to visualise the scale of the challenge in terms that are easier to understand.
The takeaway is uncomfortable but important: decarbonising today’s level of consumption may be too large a challenge on its own. Cleaner energy and better technology matter, but we also need lower and more thoughtful demand.
As a global population, we need to challenge what we consume, why we consume it, how it is produced, and what happens to goods at the end of their life.
Unless we are prepared to change what we consume, how we consume, and how often we consume, we may simply be moving the carbon problem around rather than solving it.
To get the world on track for a lower-carbon future, both consumers and supply chain operators need to act.
For consumers, the first step is to become more inquisitive and challenge our own behaviour. Better questions about what we buy, why we buy it, and how often we buy it can open the door to more conscious, lower-carbon decisions.
For supply chain operators, the first action should be to pause before committing further spend to poorly defined Net Zero initiatives. Too many programmes focus on broad carbon-neutrality claims without first understanding where carbon is being produced. That approach is unlikely to deliver value for the cost.
The right next step is to build a granular understanding of how the supply chain really operates. This does not require expensive consultancy-led programmes. It is an opportunity to collaborate with all members of the supply chain to gather operational data, identify friction, and understand where the most meaningful improvements can be made.
Once that visibility exists, the priorities become clearer. Effort, money, and resources can be directed toward changes that are tangible, measurable, and commercially useful. The most effective approach is not a single grand transformation programme, but a series of 30-day iterations that deliver meaningful improvements over the next 5 to 10 years.