A Tale of Two Datacenters recounts the arrival of two hyperscale data centers in the North of the Netherlands. It is a story of secrecy and political spin in a municipality that became known as rule-shy because of the greed of local entrepreneurs and starstruck aldermen. It's a tale of aggressive national lobbying for multinationals to settle in the Netherlands, without any plans on how to accommodate their energy demands; using the Climate Agreement to try and fix this mistake; hastening the expansion of electricity infrastructure and locking the country on a course of rapidly increasing energy consumption. This story, a reconstruction of a process of ruin, also holds sparks that can ignite resistance, jump-start public debate, and trigger political change.
