Identifying the Role of Information Systems in Achieving Energy-Related Environmental Sustainability using Text Mining

Environmental sustainability is one of the most important topics of our time. Energy consumption is a significant aspect of environmental sustainability, as it is a major source of pollution. In order to determine how information systems can assist organizations in reducing energy consumption, we first identify energy-related activities of organizations by examining the content of 4,999 sustainability reports that communicate corporate activities directed toward sustainability. We use latent semantic analysis (LSA) to extract the most prominent topics discussed in these reports and the concept of affordances in order to portray the potential role of information systems in supporting these activities. We identify five such affordances: (1) balancing supply and demand with consideration of the energy price; (2) capturing, reporting, and sharing energy-related data; (3) reducing energy consumption and emissions; (4) sustainable waste management; and (5) coordination of flexible charging of electric vehicles. These affordances support energy management through information systems in practice and set a foundation for further research in the important field of energy informatics.