Infrastructure is being asked to go green and digital at the same time.
The green and digital transitions are pursued together, and they often collide: the technologies promising sustainability are themselves energy-hungry. Infra-PaX is a research project studying how infrastructure leaders navigate that paradox — from the decisions individual leaders make, to the ecosystems those decisions land in.
The challenge
European policy treats digital technology as the route to net-zero. But data centres, supercomputing facilities, cryptocurrencies and AI already consume around 2% of global electricity, and that share is climbing. The means can defeat the end.
Green
Net-zero targets, circularity, decarbonised assets — binding, dated and increasingly enforced.
Digital
Digital twins, AI and dense sensing — promoted as the route to those same targets and energy-hungry in themselves.
Paradox
Two demands that are opposing, interdependent and persistent. Pushing harder on one can move the other further away.
What Infra-PaX will investigate
Leaders cannot settle this tension by choosing a side, because both demands persist and each intensifies the other. They have to keep deciding while the conflict stays live. Very little is known about how they actually do it — and almost nothing about how the same tension behaves once it travels between the organisations that build and run infrastructure together.
Infra-PaX studies that at two levels at once, and then joins them.
Micro-level
Inside the organisation
How individual leaders recognise a paradox, frame it and respond — traced through the strategic episodes where the tension actually surfaces.
Macro-level
Across the ecosystem
How the same tensions play out between organisations — owners, contractors, regulators, communities — and what path-dependences build up between them.
Synthesis
Putting the two together
What leaders do and what the ecosystem does are studied in parallel, across the same organisations, so that the findings can be brought together into paradox management that works at both levels at once — and tested with the practitioners it is meant for.
People
Prof. dr. ir. Eleni Papadonikolaki
Principal Investigator
Two fully-funded PhD researchers will join the research project, working in parallel across the same partner organisations.
Join us
Doing a PhD
Two four-year positions, one following leaders inside organisations, one mapping the ecosystem around them.
Becoming a research partner
For infrastructure organisations willing to be studied over years rather than surveyed once.
Latest news
All news »Infra-PaX launches
Welcome to the Infra-PaX research project. Watch a short film introducing it and stay tuned for the initial outputs.
Join Infra-PaX
As the Infra-PaX project enters its empirical phase, see an open call for PhD candidates and industry research partners.
Infra-PaX receives NWO VIDI funding
The Dutch Research Council has awarded a VIDI grant to Infra-PaX, a five-year research project on how infrastructure leaders navigate the twin transition.