Laura Watts'Federated Fair Trade Energy'-- what is that?
@dawnnafus and myself have just written a paper that speculates on what this could be.
If you want to know more, and hangout with others exploring what 'Computing within Limits' might look like, join us all online at LIMITS 2026 next week...
Federated Fair Trade Energy: Speculative Fabulation for a Planet with Limits
What happens to permacomputing when electricity grids shift to decentralised green energy, and local communities and municipalities have increased governance over this vital public service? Electricity and computational networks are more than just separate systems that plug together. Shifts to renewable energy generation in the grid are impacting computational systems, and computational demands on electrical power are impacting the electricity grid; one infrastructure limits the other. Permacomputing research tends to focus on 'off-grid' or 'behind-the-meter' energy. This sacrifices some of the social justice benefits that the public electricity grid, managed and regulated for universal service, was designed to provide. Our paper uses empirically-grounded 'speculative fabulation' to identify research opportunities in permacomputing that open up when energy systems are federated across communities. The speculative fabulation takes the form of an interview between the energy manager of a future energy island in the North Sea and a permacomputing podcaster. This allows us to conceive of computing-grid integration in tractable social and ecological terms, and introduce a notion of 'fair trade energy'.
Waterkant Festival
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