About Infra-PaX

Two transitions, at once

Society is going through a digital transition and a sustainability transition at the same time. European policy treats the first as a means to the second: digital technology is promoted as the way to reach net-zero. That framing has a name — the twin transition — and it contains an assumption worth testing.

The assumption is that the two pull the same way. Often they do not. Digital twins, artificial intelligence and the data centres behind them are themselves energy-hungry. Data centres, supercomputing facilities, cryptocurrencies and AI already consume around 2% of global electricity, and that share is rising steeply. The more devices connect, the more data moves and the higher the energy demand climbs — a pattern with a long history, from Jevons’ observation that more efficient coal engines led to more coal being burned, to the rebound effects that follow efficiency gains today.

The paradox

This is a paradox in the strict sense used in organisation research: two demands that are opposing, interdependent and persistent. They cannot be traded off once and settled, because pursuing either one intensifies the other. EU policy calls the phenomenon the twin transition. The tension it creates is what this research project calls the twin transition paradox.

The people who carry that tension are decision-makers. A director who commissions a digital twin to cut emissions may raise them. A team that adopts material passports for circularity inadvertently increases the data the organisation has to store and process. An AI tool built to reduce waste in a water network can consume more than it saves. These are not implementation failures. They are the structure of the problem.

What Infra-PaX asks

How do infrastructure owners and businesses navigate paradoxes arising from simultaneous digitalisation and sustainability transitions, at intra-organisational and ecosystem levels?

Existing paradox research studies tensions that arise inside organisations, usually private and profit-driven, where a conflict carries an immediate financial consequence. Infra-PaX looks instead at paradoxes that arrive from outside — from regulation, from policy, from public expectation — landing on organisations whose value-set is broader than profit.

Why infrastructure

Infrastructure is where this paradox bites hardest, for three reasons.

The stakes are large. Construction is responsible for around 43% of global greenhouse gas emissions and roughly 39% of energy-related carbon emissions. Decisions taken about infrastructure assets persist for decades.

The demands are explicit and opposing. Dutch infrastructure owners work under national commitments to a 95% reduction in greenhouse gases and zero-carbon electricity by 2050, while also being held to standards for digitally-enabled delivery — and while managing ageing assets and shortages of skilled people.

The setting is public and shared. Infrastructure is delivered by ecosystems, not single firms: owners, contractors, engineers, regulators and communities, answerable for societal value and not only economic return. That makes it an unusually good place to study how a paradox travels between organisations, which is something paradox research has rarely been able to observe.

We study this across road, rail, water, aviation and port infrastructure, and we are actively looking for partner organisations to work with. If that might be you, we would like to hear from you.

The research project

Infra-PaX is a five-year research project funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) under the Talent Scheme, VIDI (project number 22191), and hosted at Delft University of Technology in the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences. It runs from 2026 to 2031 and is delivered by Eleni Papadonikolaki together with two PhD candidates.

Project summary

Infrastructure owners increasingly adopt digital technologies to improve their operational efficiency. However, integrating digitalisation with national and/or European sustainability objectives is challenging due to energy-hungry technologies. Apart from maintaining high-quality services for users, leaders in infrastructure must balance the demands of digital transformation and environmental responsibility. This study explores strategies that infrastructure leaders can employ to balance the sometimes conflicting goals of digitalisation and sustainability. By analysing leadership approaches within the infrastructure sector and their inter-connectedness, the research offers insights to guide infrastructure leaders through these complex transitions, ensuring that technological advancements contribute positively to sustainable development and societal well-being.