Watts, Laura, and Julia Velkova. 2025. ‘From Flatlands to Livable Futures: Unflattening Carbon Metrics in the Energy and Data Industries’. Big Data & Society 12 (4): 20539517251396074.
‘From Flatlands to Livable Futures’ is now out in the Journal of Big Data and Society, and is open access.
Julia Velkova and I somehow managed to pack in our multitude of insights about the carbon intensity of electricity and power in the data industry: how the carbon metric is made, how it is parsed between energy and tech, how it shapes both the electricity grid and data centers, and what it does to landscapes, livelihoods, and people. We talk about Grid Grabbing, Unflattening Power Purchase Agreements, and we speculate on an Electricity Atlas as a way to explore richer relationships and futures for an inseparable energy-data industry.