Industrial Excess: Data Storage, Energy and Utility Planning Before, During and After Digital Industrialisation

Abstract

Excess is usually understood in research as the point at which materiality gets too much. This article shows instead that materiality is always already excessive. The energy utility workers in our study convey that any product making industry also makes excess. In their view, excess as an energetic form is impossible to eliminate from industrial operations. Excess can be reduced, but complete elimination is only possible if industrial operation did not exist. This concretised state of excess becomes apparent when studying the plans facilitating digital industries’ expansion projects. We focus on an implemented utility infrastructure plan for connecting a ‘big tech’ hyperscale datacentre to a public energy system and the classification work it involves. This particular plan leads us to the analytical object of industrial excess. Despite the high impact on public infrastructures and energy consumption, utility plans and these connections with industrialisation projects have been overlooked within scholarship on the digital economy and datacentres. We call this process of connection-making digital industrialisation. Our ethnography with utility workers in Odense, Denmark, shows three analytical entries of boundaries, scales, and admission points into the practices of planning for, with and against excess in connecting expanding industries to publicly owned, non-profitable utility infrastructure. The utility plan shields the energy system against high pollution impacts of digital industrialisation at a municipal scale but exposes its climatic consequences at a transnational scale. The notion of industrial excess devise how forms of industrial product-making and consumptions of industrial products are infrastructurally normalized, and which are not, ultimately giving insight into the radical potential of the non-profitable utility as a figure for ecological transformation.