Limits to digitalization: Exploring the transition challenges of Norwegian data centers

Energy transition hopes hinge on digitalization's ability to dematerialize. However, the digital is material. The cloud is a metaphor, made up of tangible infrastructure and data centers that rely on human and environmental inputs. Their overlooked footprints, massive and rising, jeopardize sustainability. Looking past cloud metaphors, we address data center footprints and conflicts. With unparalleled access to a secretive industry and broad participation from policy actors with conflicting digital agendas, L2D builds knowledge on the role of digitalization in Norway's energy transition.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

The energy transition tends to foreground the efficiency of energy-intensive industries over energy sufficiency. Limits to digitalization (L2D) will address this paradox by studying digital infrastructures (e.g., data centers) to explore the socio-environmental implications of digitalization. L2D will develop a conceptual framework for digital infrastructure sufficiency, thus contributing to the challenges outlined in the portfolio plan through addressing knowledge gaps around energy and material consumption and local impacts of data center establishments, seen against the beneficial prospects of digitalization through improved efficiency, de-materialization, and value-creation. Fundamentally, L2D asks whether these tensions imply a need for "limits" to digitalization, and what such limits might look like. 

L2D explores Twin Transition challenges through the lens of Norwegian data centers. We consider energy transitions' impacts on society, climate, and nature, through the on-going attempt by Norway to become a global hub for digital infrastructure, justified by reference to digitalization's environmental, climate, and societal benefits. Norwegian decision makers at all levels struggle to make sense of and govern the trade-offs around data center establishments. Through a novel partnership with Norwegian municipalities, national policy makers, and industry, L2D conducts local case studies, studies national governance in a cross-national comparative perspective, and helps shape the emerging frameworks around this nascent industry. The project's unprecedented access to and collaboration with the notoriously secretive data center industry aims to hold Norwegian industry partners accountable to the highest international standards, and enable leading scientific partners to develop knowledge and tools for improved decision-making and transparency around energy and data center governance.

PROJECT TIMELINE, DECEMBER 2023-NOVEMBER 2027