Applying Industrial Ecology in Urban Planning for the local integration of data centers

Sammanfattning: The data center industry’s rapid development raises questions about how to regulate data center locations and expansion, becoming a matter of high concern regarding Urban Planning. Data center facilities are commonly located and scaled (regarding power and size) responding to business profitability interests steered by the global market. This makes data centers lose the sense of belonging and relationship with the specific territory, with specific ecosystems where they are located.  Urban planners’ role in data center establishments could guarantee the relationship and interaction with the local social, economic, and environmental ecosystems.  The increasing concern about environmental problems, such as electronic waste streams, or energy consumption, and their impact on a local context makes the interplay between Urban Planning and Industrial Ecology a relevant field of research. The study of their relationship shows pathways to plan and enable the data centre industry transition towards a more sustainable approach. This thesis analyzes the data center establishments in a specific territory, Sweden, as a phenomenon. A phenomenon in which data centers perturbate the social, economic, and environmental ecosystems where established. Data centers consume a considerable amount of local resources: land, water, and electricity; consequently, they produce a considerable amount of excess heat from this electricity consumption. A pre-study of the data center phenomenon in Sweden showed that only 10% of the data centers established utilize excess heat to support other activities in the local context. This example shows that Sweden lacks strategies to mitigate data centers’ energy waste, and therefore might need to increase the strategic focus when planning data center locations to achieve a more sustainable management of the resources consumed and produced by this industry within the Swedish territory. When considering the territory as a frame for analysis, questions about scale and levels of analytical resolution in Industrial Ecology research and practice are of the upmost relevance. Industrial Ecology researchers warn that there is not a simple analytical hierarchy from local to global; instead, there are multiple ways to delineate space: political/administrative jurisdictions, economic regions, or ecological regions among others, and these delineations/boundaries are usually mismatched. Some authors have already started defining the relationships between Urban Planning and Industrial Ecology in a generic way. The research in this thesis wants to build on previous research to pursue a deeper understanding of how the Urban Planning field (usually following administrative boundaries) can serve the Industrial Ecology field, by focusing the analysis on a specific industrial system, namely the data center industry. This is done by analyzing planning practices, activities, tools, aspects, or strategies related to existing data center establishments that hinder or enable this industrial system to resemble nature’s ecosystem dynamics. The thesis compiles five embedded studies (Study I, II, III, IV, V) within a single case study, the data center phenomenon in Sweden. The unit of analysis in each embedded study is defined following administrative boundaries (country, region, municipality), but the obtained results from the embedded studies are analyzed under the Industrial Ecology multi-level analytical perspective; Macro (Settlement patterns and resource flows); Meso (Industrial symbiosis and urban eco-efficiency standards); Micro (planning and policy actions). This multi-level analytical framework acknowledges the mismatched boundaries between Urban Planning scales (national, regional, municipal) and Industrial Ecology analytical levels (macro, meso, micro). This framework translates the simple analytical hierarchy used in Urban Planning practice into the complexity of natural ecosystems. This translation, as the main result of this thesis, is fundamental to make relevant planning actors, (practitioners, researchers, etc.) understand their role in supporting the transition of existing and emerging economic activities within the data center industry, to resemble nature’s systems dynamics.