Digital innovation relies on developments in transformative digital technologies, including techniques for transmitting, analysing, managing, storing and protecting data. These improvements enable innovation in other sectors, industries and domains. As digital technologies become more powerful, they can spur cascading changes throughout the wider economy.
Many digital technologies or technological enablers can help to spur innovation in other digital technology-using sectors, like the energy sector. For example, AI systems can be deployed throughout electricity systems, enabling better management and analysis of data from end-user devices, or forecasting and detecting faults within legacy electricity power plants.
More digitalised electricity systems require advances in data management to handle increased data volumes from electricity grids, decentralised renewable energy producers such as solar-powered households, and communication equipment like smart meters. Similarly, data transport – namely the transmission of data across communication networks, including wirelessly – becomes necessary to enable the seamless analysis of data from connected devices. Cloud computing, enabling critical scalability and remote data processing, as well as concerns about digital security also increase in importance as digital technologies proliferate throughout electricity systems (IEA, 2025[7]; IEA/EPO, 2024[1]).
Patent data offer a unique perspective into the trajectory of technological innovation by providing evidence on the emergence, diffusion and commercial applications of digital technologies, including in energy systems. Patents in the use of five digital technological enablers in electricity system applications greatly increased following 2010 (Figure 1).
Patents in digital innovations in electricity systems using AI technologies increased more than fourfold between 2017 and 2022, reflecting the rapid development of AI technologies themselves. In contrast, the number of energy patents related to data transport, data management and cloud computing saw rapid growth earlier in the century, growing threefold or more between 2009 and 2013, before slowing substantially in later years. There were fewer patents in data transport and data management for electricity systems in 2022 than in 2012, for example (IEA/EPO, 2024[1]) (Figure 1).
