Industrial Excess and the Reproduction of Power: Encountering the Work of Heating a Danish City with Facebook Data

This PhD thesis in Science and Technology Studies (STS) explores effects of the digital economy through ethnographic fieldwork in Odense, Denmark, on the emerging connections between energy and data storage. The thesis is overall drawn together in the study of how energy production is connected to the reproduction of the digital economy. It shows the need for detailed insights into how utility workers carry the heavy load of decarbonising energy and industrial energy consumption.

The three vectors of the connection are: 1) infrastructures of public heating and data storage; 2) the political constellation co-constituted with Facebook’s entry into Odense; and 3) the epistemic meetings in the engineering practice.

The first article shows how the excess air emitted from the Facebook datacenter in Odense is in vernacular terms ‘industrial excess’. The enrolment of the heating utility to datacenter exemplifies the different boundaries of production and consumption of late industrialism. These relations need reconceptualization to account for how the energy production of utilities and commodity production of industries are not equally industrial and therefore have different effects on escalating climate change.

The second article unfolds how Facebook managed to cement itself in the city of Odense. This analysis takes the approach that the platform is the most prominent ‘layer’ of the digital economy, where the platform is akin to the visible tip of the iceberg. Yet, it argues that the visible platform obscures the political relations of reciprocity between the technology company and politicians that exchange land, energy, and autonomy to receive (unfulfilled) promises of economic rewards for the welfare state.

The final article documents how public sector engineers connect large heat pumps to the excess air generated by the datacenter, while simultaneously contending with market pressures from small, individual, private heat pumps driven by climate policy. The engineers employ the law of energy conservation in thermodynamics to decarbonise energy but is interrupted with the economic competition as a law to market dynamics. In doing so, the engineers’ insistence on the monopoly of public, nonprofitable heating provides a lesson for dealing with the monopoly of tech companies.

The thesis concludes that the power to share energy between public and private actors is enabled by an existing infrastructure around district heating as well as ongoing utility work. Ethnographic utility studies as exemplified with the thesis helps us better understand how politics in the age of the digital economy are incremental and exposed to economic interruptions. Conceptualisations of the distinction between public and private actors have with the study shown to be inadequate for grasping the power at play in efforts to decarbonise energy and require to be reconceptualised in the realm of differences between shared and industrial infrastructures. The maintenance of critical infrastructure within planetary boundaries therefore hinges on the extension of the shared, non-profitable, local ownership and responsibility forms of district heating onto other infrastructures as well as practical intervention into the proportions of industrial production.