Silent emissions: The cyber-infrastructure environmental impacts of autonomous vehicles

Kendrick Hardaway, Oscar Teran and Hua Cai

Applied Energy, 2025, vol. 392, issue C, No S0306261925006798

Abstract: In the consideration of how autonomous vehicles (AVs) can contribute to or hinder in achieving environmental goals, there is a critical aspect that must be included: AV data management. This aspect, encompassing both in-vehicle and cyber infrastructure energy requirements, has been neglected in many AV environmental impact studies. To address this gap, we calculated the energy requirements and greenhouse gas emissions associated with AV data management, including previously neglected cyber infrastructure components such as data storage and security. With a mathematical model, we tested various scenarios within a United States-based AV fleet, consisting of 15 key variables like computational efficiency, vehicle models (e.g., Waymo, Tesla), sensor capabilities, data transfer, storage, and cybersecurity. Our findings reveal that neglecting to include cyber infrastructure components underestimates the environmental impact of AV data management by at least 20 %. In the context of increased adoption, a 40 % market penetration of fully autonomous vehicles in the United States could demand up to 6278 GWh/year for data management alone (about 4.3 % of current US solar capacity for reference), highlighting the potential for AV adoption to intensify energy needs amidst the renewable energy transition. Thus, our results emphasize the significance of including the essential cyber infrastructure for AV data management in environmental assessments.

Keywords: Autonomous vehicles; Energy use; Data management; Cyber infrastructure; Environmental assessment; Digital economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261925006798
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:appene:v:392:y:2025:i:c:s0306261925006798

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 405891/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2025.125949

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Energy is currently edited by J. Yan

More articles in Applied Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().