Green Technology

In plain words

An LED bulb gives the same light as an old filament bulb for a fraction of the electricity. A heat pump keeps a home as warm as a gas boiler without burning gas. That is an example of green technology. It does the same job and the damage to air, water, land and climate goes down.

The idea goes back to the 1992 Earth Summit. Agenda 21 called them environmentally sound technologies, ones that pollute less, use resources more sustainably and recycle more than the technologies they replace. It also said they are whole systems, including the know-how and services around the equipment.

Main types

Where it matters most

Energy supply is the biggest source, which is why solar and wind get most of the attention. Counted another way, with electricity charged to whoever uses it, industry rises to 34% and buildings to 16%. Other datasets, such as Climate Watch, split the sectors differently, so it helps to check the source and year behind any share.

By the numbers

Is it really green?

Three things decide whether a green technology delivers what it promises.

• Life-cycle assessment adds up the impact from mining to disposal. An electric car starts with a bigger carbon debt than a petrol car because of its battery, and pays it back over the years it is driven. How quickly depends on how clean the local grid is.
• When efficiency makes energy cheaper, people tend to use more of it. A 2021 review of the evidence by Brockway, Sorrell and others found that across a whole economy, rebound may erode more than half of the expected energy savings.
• Greenwashing, the European Commission found that 53% of green claims on products in the EU were vague, misleading or unfounded, and 40% had no supporting evidence. The EU Taxonomy now sets out which activities count as sustainable, against six objectives that cover climate, water, the circular economy, pollution and biodiversity.

Where it's used today

• Norway: fully electric cars were about 96% of new car sales in 2025, the result of years of tax breaks and charging investment.
• Ørsted, Denmark: once a coal-heavy utility, it closed its last coal-fired plant in 2024 and now builds mostly offshore wind. Its Hornsea 2 farm off Yorkshire has 1.3 GW of capacity, enough for over 1.4 million UK homes.
• BYD and Tesla: in 2025, BYD sold more fully electric cars than Tesla for the first time, about 2.26 million against 1.64 million.
• Google: aims to run on carbon-free energy every hour of every day on every grid by 2030. It reported about 65% for 2025, while its electricity use grew 37%.
• Climeworks Mammoth, Iceland: a direct air capture plant built to remove 36,000 tonnes of CO2 a year. It removed 675 tonnes in the first half of 2026, a reminder of how far some green technologies still are from their design scale.

Green tech and computing

Computing is now big part of the green technology. Data centres used about 485 TWh of electricity in 2025, and the IEA expects that to roughly double to 950 TWh by 2030, mostly because of AI. On the hardware side, the world produced a record 62 million tonnes of e-waste in 2022, and only 22.3% of it was formally collected and recycled.

The green technology answers here are efficient chips, liquid cooling, data centres powered by clean energy, longer device lifespans and better recycling. For developers, it can be as simple as caching results, running smaller models where they're good enough and not repeating work a shared service already does.

Limitations

• Batteries, magnets and solar panels need lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper and rare earths, whose mining has its own environmental and human cost.
• Solar and wind depend on the weather, so they need storage, stronger grids and flexible demand alongside them.
• Green options often cost more upfront even when they save money over their lifetime, which puts them out of reach for many households and poorer countries.
• Some technologies, like carbon capture and green hydrogen, work but are still small next to the problem.